same-sex marriage – Hot Airhttp://hotair.com
The world’s first, full-service conservative Internet broadcast networkSat, 10 Dec 2016 01:41:13 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.116302432Kaine: Pretty sure the Catholic Church will accept the progressive gospel on same-sex marriagehttp://hotair.com/archives/2016/09/12/kaine-pretty-sure-catholic-church-will-accept-progressive-gospel-sex-marriage/
Tue, 13 Sep 2016 00:41:31 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3922111Repent, secular heretic, and embrace the revelation du jour!Over the weekend, Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine spoke at a Human Rights Watch event, extolling the virtues of his running mate on LGBTQ rights and dismissing Donald Trump’s claims to championing their interests. Kaine took a detour from that mission, though, to offer a campaign promise unlike anything ever seen. Kaine, a Catholic, noted that his unconditional support for same-sex marriage puts him at odds with his church, but predicted that the Vatican would adopt the progressive gospel in the future:

“My full, complete, unconditional support for marriage equality is at odds with the current doctrine of the church that I still attend,” Kaine said at a dinner celebrating gay rights. “But I think that’s going to change, too.” …

Kaine said he wanted to be honest about his own struggles with reconciling his advocacy of equal rights with the teachings of a church that restricts marriage to a man and woman.

“My church also teaches me about a Creator in the first chapter of Genesis who surveys the entire world including mankind and said, ‘It is very good. It is very good,’” Kaine said.

“Who am I to challenge God for the beautiful diversity of the human family?” he added. “I think we’re supposed to celebrate, not challenge it.”

Let’s start with Kaine’s set-up on this issue. He refers to the Catholic Church’s position on marriage as “the current doctrine,” which makes it sound as though it was a recent development on a changeable practice. In Catholic theology, though, doctrine doesn’t change, even though practices can and do. Doctrine, once revealed in both scripture and the magisterium (a fancy word for teachings by the doctors of the church) and accepted by the Pope and the synod of bishops, remains unchangeable. Acknowledging it as doctrine contradicts the pretense that it is changeable at all.

Even putting aside the obvious contradictions to this claim that can easily be found in both scripture and the Catholic catechism (CNS News has a starter list of citations), recent events make it clear that the Vatican has no intention of opening up the sacrament of marriage for revision. The Synods on the Family, on which I reported from the Vatican during the opening session in 2014, only discussed same-sex marriage in the context of welcoming the children of such secular unions to the Gospel to ensure universal evangelism, while reminding gays and lesbians that they are welcome to join the church on the church’s terms, like any other voluntary association. The bishops rejected an attempt to allow for divorce and remarriage without a finding of sacramental nullity among heterosexual couples, let alone propose and discuss changing doctrine on the fundamental nature of marriage as a union of man and woman and a reflection of the creative power of Trinitarian life.

It seems that Kaine suffers from the same malady as Nicholas Kristof earlier this month, who mused in a New York Times column about whether Jesus would be Christian when he returns. “Jesus never focused on gays or abortion, but on the sick and the poor,” Kristof wrote. True, but St. Paul certainly wrote against homosexuality in letters accepted as canonical by every Christian denomination, and the Christian church has advocated opposition to abortion since the first century of its existence (in the Didache, among other teachings of the time). These also are not “current doctrine” but two-thousand-year-old doctrines in the church.

That’s the problem, according to Kristof. He quotes Brian McLaren in arguing that Christians should dispense with doctrine altogether, which is at least a more honest approach:

“What would it mean for Christians to rediscover their faith not as a problematic system of beliefs but as a just and generous way of life, rooted in contemplation and expressed in compassion?” McLaren asks in “The Great Spiritual Migration.” “Could Christians migrate from defining their faith as a system of beliefs to expressing it as a loving way of life?”

In other words, Kristof and McLaren propose an end to faith and religious belief, and replacing it with philosophy. Philosophy has its uses, but it’s highly malleable, and in the end makes each person the center of their own morally relative universe rather than putting God at the center of the objective universe. To say that Jesus taught people to orient themselves in the opposite direction would be an understatement. We most certainly should endeavor to live our lives in a loving way, but we worship God, not ways of life — and the most loving ways of life are those that reflect both His truths and His charitable love. That worship of the Creator separates religion from philosophy, and requires doctrinal education to be aware of those truths passed to us through the Gospel of Jesus’ ministry, scripture, and the teachings of the Apostles.

Speaking of charitable love, I’d sneer at this attempt to fit Jesus into one’s own political perspective if it wasn’t such a universal impulse and universal failing, and one into which I’ve fallen at times, too. All those who imperfectly try to follow Christ and discern His will fall at times into the trap of measuring Jesus by our own yardstick, rather than measure ourselves to His. Rare indeed are the people who can resist that impulse, and those who operate in the public square face more temptations and incentives to do so publicly. As one of those who also work in that same marketplace, the episode of Jesus’ ministry with the stone-throwers and the sinful woman comes to mind here.

However, while we should recognize that fault within ourselves before judging others on it, we can certainly point out the error into which Kaine (and Kristof) fall. In this instance, Kaine’s talking through his hat, whatever his motives might be.

]]>3922111Did Pope Francis open the door to communion for divorced and remarried Catholics?http://hotair.com/archives/2016/04/08/did-pope-francis-open-the-door-to-communion-for-divorced-and-remarried-catholics/
Fri, 08 Apr 2016 12:41:13 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3900386“Consequently, I do not recommend a rushed reading of the text.” In the seventh paragraph of his new apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis warns observers to take their time in digesting what he has written — and perhaps implies that they should be cautious in reading between the lines. Nevertheless, the media will do its best to do the latter before doing the former, and Reuters reports that Francis “seemed to embrace this view” of the progressives at the Synod:

Progressives have proposed the use of an “internal forum” in which a priest or bishop work with a Catholic who has divorced and remarried to decide jointly, privately and on a case-by-case basis if he or she can be fully re-integrated and receive communion.

Francis seemed to embrace this view, saying he could “not provide a new set of general rules … applicable to all cases”, but he called for “responsible, personal and pastoral discernment of particular cases”. …

Francis said he understood those conservatives who “prefer a more rigorous pastoral care which leaves no room for confusion” but the Church should be more attentive to the good that can be found “in the midst of human weakness”.

“The Church turns with love to those who participate in her life in an imperfect manner,” he said, including in this category those Catholics who are cohabiting, married civilly or are divorced and remarried.

But does that mean that church teaching will change on access to the Eucharist for divorced and civilly remarried Catholics? According to Crux’ Ines St. Martin, it’s not clear that the pontiff actually wrote that, or that it should change:

On the hot-button question of Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics, Francis does not create any new Church law, but he does appear to encourage priests and bishops to be open to allowing at least some people in that situation to return to the sacrament after a period of discernment.

Francis calls for “a responsible personal and pastoral discernment of particular cases, one which would recognize that, since ‘the degree of responsibility is not equal in all cases,’ the consequences or effects of a rule need not necessarily always be the same.”

In a key footnote, he adds, “This is also the case with regard to sacramental discipline.” …

However, despite the length of the document and the variety of issues explored, for Pope Francis this is only a way to kick-start further study and reflection.

In the second paragraph, the pope says: “The complexity of the issues that arose revealed the need for continued open discussion of a number of doctrinal, moral, spiritual, and pastoral questions.”

With that in mind, and especially in regard to “sacramental discipline,” expect a lot of focus to fall on footnote 351 on paragraph 305, which provides the most direct point on the issue of communion. Here is that passage in its entirety, part of Chapter 8, “Accompanying, Discerning, and Integrating Weakness”:

305. For this reason, a pastor cannot feel that it is enough simply to apply moral laws to those living in “irregular” situations, as if they were stones to throw at people’s lives. This would bespeak the closed heart of one used to hiding behind the Church’s teachings, “sitting on the chair of Moses and judging at times with superiority and superficiality difficult cases and wounded families”.349 Along these same lines, the International Theological Commission has noted that “natural law could not be presented as an already established set of rules that impose themselves a priori on the moral subject; rather, it is a source of objective inspiration for the deeply personal process of making decisions”.350 Because of forms of conditioning and mitigating factors, it is possible that in an objective situation of sin – which may not be subjectively culpable, or fully such – a person can be living in God’s grace, can love and can also grow in the life of grace and charity, while receiving the Church’s help to this end.351 Discernment must help to find possible ways of responding to God and growing in the midst of limits. By thinking that everything is black and white, we sometimes close off the way of grace and of growth, and discourage paths of sanctification which give glory to God. Let us remember that “a small step, in the midst of great human limitations, can be more pleasing to God than a life which appears outwardly in order, but moves through the day without confronting great difficulties”.352 The practical pastoral care of ministers and of communities must not fail to embrace this reality.

[fn]351 In certain cases, this can include the help of the sacraments. Hence, “I want to remind priests that the confessional must not be a torture chamber, but rather an encounter with the Lord’s mercy” (Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium [24 November 2013], 44: AAS 105 [2013], 1038). I would also point out that the Eucharist “is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak” (ibid., 47: 1039).

Francis cites his own work in regard to both sacraments in the footnote, and it’s not an accident that this comes in the chapter on discernment in weakness. The “field hospital” analogy for the Church has been a continuing theme in Francis’ papacy. And yet, Francis clearly had the opening to move church teaching with an encyclical, or at least set up specific guidelines for this discernment and mercy. Instead, he left the question open, even after two synods that focused specifically on this question. Why?

The key to this question might be found in the nature of the document itself. An apostolic exhortation commonly follows a synod and frames the kind of action that popes want the church to undertake. However, it does not rise to the level of a papal encyclical, in which a pontiff lays out his view of doctrinal matters. The second paragraph, which calls for more discussion and more discernment, makes Amoris Laetitia into more of a mission statement that intends to frame further discussion.

As I repeatedly reported while at the Extraordinary Synod in 2014 (in partnership with Catholic Match Institute), this issue has been the main focus of this two-year effort all along. At that time, the media seized on the discussion of same-sex marriage and related issues, but it turned out to be nothing more than a background issue. Just as with the synodal documents, Amoris Laetitia only addresses that issue in brief, mainly to remind the Church to treat all with dignity but also to emphasize that same-sex or non-marital unions “may not simply be equated with marriage” (paragraph 52):

We need to acknowledge the great variety of family situations that can offer a certain stability, but de facto or same-sex unions, for example, may not simply be equated with marriage. No union that is temporary or closed to the transmission of life can ensure the future of society. But nowadays who is making an effort to strengthen marriages, to help married couples overcome their problems, to assist them in the work of raising children and, in general, to encourage the stability of the marriage bond?

It was this latter question which drove the discussion regarding same-sex marriages and civil unions, not the notion that the Catholic Church would embrace them. The media coverage, with some exceptions, missed that entirely at the time.

Speaking of further discussion, I will guest host on Relevant Radio this afternoon. For much more in-depth discussion and analysis of Amoris Laetitia and its meaning and impact on the Catholic Church, tune in all day long, including the 3-6 pm ET slot, where I will fill in for Drew Mariani. They plan wall-to-wall coverage and analysis of the new apostolic exhortation, and we will definitely do the same in the afternoon.

]]>3900386The wrong sales pitchhttp://hotair.com/archives/2016/03/28/the-wrong-sales-pitch/
Mon, 28 Mar 2016 20:01:31 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3899016This past weekend was Easter, the most important religious observance for Christians, and as one myself it got me to thinking about the current state of religious liberty in the United States and the incredible damage done to liberty by religious (predominantly evangelical Christian) and social conservatives.

“But, wait!” you cry, “Religious liberty is under attack and social conservatives are fighting to protect it!” True, as far as it goes, which is only as far as trying to grasp on to what’s left of what should have been their primary focus decades ago: protecting everyone’s liberty instead of trying to use political and police power to enforce a particular personal and religious moral code.

A recent effort of social conservatives to try and straw grasp is Georgia House Bill 757, which Georgia Governor Nathan Deal (a Republican) has announced he will veto after pressure exerted by interests like the NFL and the entertainment industry who have threatened to pull their significant investments in Georgia over legalized “discrimination”. Bills like 757 should be no brainers, and should be loved by anyone who respects individual liberty, but the problem is we’ve let them be cast in terms of hate, thanks to social conservatives’ denial of individual liberties over decades.

I think there’s an easy way to turn the arguments against religious freedom protection bills on their heads and get the people who are opposing them to support them: these aren’t religious liberty protection bills, they are actually LGBT, et al. protection bills!

Wait, what?!

You see, there is one key question that needs to be put to those who think “equality” can be achieved by forcing a baker to bake a cake, a photographer to take pictures, or whatever other example you care to concoct against their personal religious beliefs that is never asked. It’s this:

Why would you want to purchase goods or services from someone who doesn’t value you as a customer?

We live in a distributed mass media society. Distributed mass media means that dissatisfied customers can express their dissatisfaction to family, friends, and the entire world connected by the Internet at will. Anyone, anywhere can either view or post near-instantaneous feedback on goods or services they have either purchased or are planning to buy. New economy services like eBay, Uber, Lyft, and AirBnB put great weight on reviews of both providers and customers. You can find user reviews of just about everything, and use your own brain to figure out whether you want to give a particular business or vendor your money.

Take it to its logical conclusion: I read from reviews that a particular business doesn’t like doing business with <fill in whatever protected class you want>. If <aforementioned protected class> is a concern of mine, or I’m a member thereof, and the personal cost to me and my convictions is too great to do business with them anyway, I’ll then take my business elsewhere.

Why would I want to buy from someone who hates me or a concern of mine, when they’re being forced to provide goods or services for no other reason than the current political culture’s wielding of police powers? How could I have faith that I’m getting the highest quality good or service from them?

A business that identifies itself as not wanting to cater to same-sex couples for goods and services is a benefit to same-sex couples. They can then take their business to someone who embraces selling to same-sex couples, rather than unwittingly supporting someone opposed to their lifestyle.

And guess what? If enough people don’t like the fact that a particular business doesn’t cater to same-sex couples, that business won’t be in business very long. That’s how free markets are supposed to work.

Georgia’s response to Disney, et al. should have been, “This bill makes it easier for you to do business in our state because you will now be able to identify the people you don’t want to do business with because of their beliefs!”

Getting people’s prejudices out into the open allows for real or perceived wrongs to be handled economically by free market dynamics and gets the contents of people’s hearts and minds out of the purview of government, where they don’t belong in the first place.

Imagine: a simultaneous victory for both “social justice warriors” and people who want to assert their religious freedom. Gosh, that’s actually government being neutral between competing societal concerns that it shouldn’t be involved with in the first place.

]]>3899016Here we go. Alabama supreme court Chief Justice halts same sex marriagehttp://hotair.com/archives/2016/01/06/here-we-go-alabama-supreme-court-chief-justice-halts-same-sex-marriage/
http://hotair.com/archives/2016/01/06/here-we-go-alabama-supreme-court-chief-justice-halts-same-sex-marriage/#commentsWed, 06 Jan 2016 20:21:23 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3889206Well, this is just what we needed four weeks before the Iowa caucuses, isn’t it? In Alabama, the Mobile County Probate Court has stopped issuing any and all marriage licenses to applicants for the time being. The reason is that state supreme court Chief Justice Roy Moore has issued an order halting any marriages which are “contrary” to an existing state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and a matching law passed previously. (WKRG Alabama)

In a four page administrative order, Chief Justice Roy Moore says, “probate judges have a ministrial duty not to issue any marriage license contrary to the Alabama Sanctity of Marriage Amendment or the Alabama Marriage Protection Act remain in full force and effect.”

Moore says, “confusion and uncertainty exist among probate judges of this State.” The uncertainty surrounds the ruling handed down by the United States Supreme Court in the Obergefell v. Hodges in June 2015. In the 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court it states the cases come from Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee.

The debate surrounds the decision by the Alabama Supreme Court, which states that marriage licenses must be in accordance with Alabama law, versus the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to allow same-sex marriage this past summer.

At the moment this appears to be more of a procedural move than some sort of open declaration of refusal to recognize the SCOTUS ruling in Obergefell. In a clarifying statement, the Judge apparently added this caveat. (Alabama.com)

Moore, in his order today, says the Alabama Supreme Court continues to deliberate on how the U.S. Supreme Court ruling affects the state court’s orders.

I’m not sure exactly what they’re deliberating here, but for the moment it looks like a “temporary” halt while they sort out some questions raised in lower level courts. Those objections came in contrast to an order by U.S. District Judge Ginny Granade declaring both the original state law defining marriage as being between one man and one woman and the subsequent amendment to the state constitution to be unconstitutional. With this “pause” in the process, the entire question is being thrust back onto the front page.

I’ll just add this chapter as number 736 on my list of reasons why the government should stay out of the question of marriage. Why? Because by the time I finish writing this sentence, I assure you that every reporter on the campaign beat is rushing out to pin down each and every viable Republican candidate to try to goad them into responding. The long term question of whether or not a state supreme court judge can defy SCOTUS (and I don’t see how) isn’t really even the issue here. The press would love nothing more than to see if they can get any of the Republicans to go on the record in support of defying the Supreme Court on the Left’s signature issue. It might make for a brief boost in their primary numbers, but the media will make sure there’s hell to pay for it down the line.

But for now, we’ll just have to wait. I expect that this one could drag out for a while, possibly well into the actual primary elections. And why would anyone want to talk about Hillary’s mishandling of classified documents on her private email server when we can obsess over gay marriage in Alabama?

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2016/01/06/here-we-go-alabama-supreme-court-chief-justice-halts-same-sex-marriage/feed/3893889206Video: Kentucky clerk returns to work, won’t authorize licenses — or stop themhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/14/video-kentucky-clerk-returns-to-work-wont-authorize-licenses-or-stop-them/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/14/video-kentucky-clerk-returns-to-work-wont-authorize-licenses-or-stop-them/#commentsMon, 14 Sep 2015 14:01:35 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3876926Can marriage licenses without the certification of the Rowan County clerk be considered valid in Kentucky? Kim Davis says, “I myself have grave doubts” about that very question, but until the state legislature amends the law on marriage licenses to deal with the post-Obergefell legal environment, it’ll have to do. As she returned to work this morning, Davis announced the plan to satisfy the courts while refusing to have her name associated with same-sex marriage in Rowan County:

Kentucky clerk Kim Davis indicated Monday she would not interfere with her deputies issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, but that she did not want her name on them.

“If any of them feels that they must issue an unauthorized license to avoid being thrown in jail, I understand their tough choice and I will take no action against them,” Davis said in a statement read outside the courthouse.

“However, any unauthorized license that they issue will not have my name, my title or my authority on it,” Davis added. “Instead, the license will state that they are issued pursuant to a federal court order.”

U.S. District Judge David Bunning ordered Davis jailed for contempt on Sept. 3 for refusing to comply with his order to issue licenses in line with the Supreme Court ruling. He ordered her released five days later when the licenses were being issued by deputy clerks.

In his release order, Bunning warned Davis there would be consequences if she interfered with the issuance of marriage licenses, directly or indirectly, when she returned to work. …

On Friday, Davis asked the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals to allow her to continue banning marriage licenses for her entire office until a lawsuit against her is decided. Her attorneys argued that Bunning’s initial order had only covered couples who were suing her.

If the state of Kentucky recognizes these licenses as valid, then it should not cause Davis any more legal troubles. On the other hand, that would almost certainly moot the appeal, since the accommodation would allow Davis to act on her own conscience and still allow Rowan County residents to access the licenses. The state legislature will need to act to adapt licensing laws, perhaps more to ensure that county clerks cannot hijack the process in the future regardless of what the issue is, but they can also amend the statute to recognize the licenses that Davis’ office will now issue, with or without her signature and name on them.

If not, get ready for round 2. I’d guess, though, that everyone involved would like to see attention shift away from Rowan County and this fight, which gives an extra incentive to accept the validity of these certificates. Rowan County voters can decide in their next county clerk election whether they want to continue that policy.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/14/video-kentucky-clerk-returns-to-work-wont-authorize-licenses-or-stop-them/feed/2173876926SCOTUS to KY clerk: Issue marriage licenses. Clerk: Nohttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/01/scotus-to-ky-clerk-issue-marriage-licenses-clerk-no/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/01/scotus-to-ky-clerk-issue-marriage-licenses-clerk-no/#commentsTue, 01 Sep 2015 14:41:00 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3875574It’s the end of the legal road for Kim Davis in her bid to claim a religious exemption from issuing same-sex marriage licenses in Kentucky. Davis had filed suit to continue her refusal after the Obergefell decision, and had won a stay in federal court against any enforcement action. That stay expired yesterday, and the Supreme Court refused to extend it in a brief one-sentence order:

The Supreme Court on Monday turned down a Kentucky county clerk’s request to be excused from issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, the court’s first involvement in a series of legal battles that have erupted since gay couples won the right to marry.

The court, without comment, turned away a request by Kim Davis, the elected clerk of Rowan County in northeast Kentucky, who faces fines or even jail time if she doesn’t begin issuing marriage licenses Tuesday. Davis, a devout Apostolic Christian who opposes same-sex marriage, has argued that doing so would violate her religious liberties. …

Davis — who stopped issuing licenses to all couples, gay and straight — had not indicated late Monday how she would respond to the court’s decision. If she refuses to comply, she could be held in contempt, leading to daily fines or jail time. At a recent rally, Davis adopted a defiant tone, asking for prayers to “stand firm.”

Mat Staver, chairman of Liberty Counsel, a Christian legal group that is representing Davis, demurred earlier Monday when asked how she would respond if she lost.

“She’s not going to resign, but to issue a marriage license is a direct conflict with her religious convictions,” he said. “So it would put her in a real Catch-22 over having to make a decision about her convictions.”

That hasn’t stopped Davis. This morning, she again refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, saying she planned to appeal an earlier decision in the appellate court. Competing demonstrations began outside the courthouse, and the standoff continues:

We’ve written plenty of posts defending religious freedom and the right to choose not to participate in private ceremonies, but this case is different. The other cases about which we have written involve private enterprise — bakers, photographers, venue owners — who do not exercise a monopoly on their markets. Operating a private business should not strip people of the right to free religious expression in all phases of their lives; other businesses can and do wish to participate in those events, and the free market should be free for all within it.

Government is not a free market, however; it is a monopoly backed up by force. If the law says these couples can apply for and receive a marriage license, then government has to abide by that law. They exercise a monopoly on marriage licenses; these couples cannot go anywhere else to get one. This is a denial of access to market by government force, essentially, a much different situation than with bakers, photographers, and so on.

One might sympathize with Davis on her religious objections to same-sex marriage, but that doesn’t give her the authority to deny it if it is lawful. A politician might object to alcohol purchases, perhaps even on religious grounds, but he can’t deny permits to liquor stores in a jurisdiction that allows them just because of his religious objections to alcohol consumption. That would be an abuse of power, the kind conservatives would protest in other circumstances.

Accepting office in government means upholding the law. If that conflicts with Davis’ religious beliefs, then she should resign and find other work. Ignoring the law and denying services on the basis of an official’s own desires is a form of petty tyranny. We may not like the law, but those in office cannot be allowed to decide for themselves which they follow on the basis of personal preference.

Update: Kim Davis works for Rowan County. Initially, I had given her name as Kim Rowan in a couple of places. Thanks to Twitter user @Dew5150 for the correction.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/01/scotus-to-ky-clerk-issue-marriage-licenses-clerk-no/feed/7533875574Rowan County, Kentucky’s last stand on gay marriage licenseshttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/08/18/rowan-county-kentuckys-last-stand-on-gay-marriage-licenses/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/08/18/rowan-county-kentuckys-last-stand-on-gay-marriage-licenses/#commentsTue, 18 Aug 2015 13:21:32 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3873908yet]]>Kentucky, the home of one half of the infamous Hatfield v McCoy battles, has another fight raging and this time it’s in the courts. Following the Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage, the clerk of Rowan County, Kim Davis, gained some unwanted national fame when she refused to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples. This happened in a few other places, albeit briefly, but for the most part everyone else has found discretion to be the better part of valor and given up the fight. Davis, however, has not, and is still pursuing her case through the courts. She had been seeking a stay in the order to begin issuing the licenses, but a District Court judge sort of refused the request. I say “sort of” because in one of the stranger things to be seen in a courtroom in recent memory, the judge then turned around and delayed his decision not to delay.

U.S. District Judge David Bunning denied Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis’ request to delay his ruling from last week ordering her to issue marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples. That ruling followed the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in June legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide. But Bunning then delayed his own decision, effectively granting Davis’ request while also denying it.

“If the Court decided to delay enforcement of its Order while Davis pursues an unpromising appeal, it would essentially give Plaintiffs a favorable legal ruling with no teeth and prolong the likely violation of their constitutional rights,” Bunning wrote.

But Bunning acknowledged that “emotions are running high on both sides of this debate” and said he would delay his ruling while Davis appeals to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

I don’t even know what to make of that, but both sides are declaring victory for the moment. However, this still leaves us with the unanswered question of whether or not religious liberty considerations apply to government officials acting in the course of their normal duties. That’s a much easier question for many of us when it applies to the private sector, though liberals have done a stunning job of getting the courts to side with them. If you are a private citizen and small business owner and don’t want to take on a task which would effectively entail your taking part in a wedding ceremony which is contrary to your faith, you shouldn’t have to. That conclusion also factors in the understanding that it’s not exactly difficult to find somebody in the wedding services business who is sympathetic to gay rights. (To put it mildly.) In short, you can always go somewhere else and have your business taken care of.

But what about when you not only work for, but act as the representative of the government? Much like a drivers license or most other government documents, the customer can’t simply go down the street to Bob’s Big House of Licenses and get one there. The government holds an iron clad monopoly on most licenses. (There are exceptions where they farm it out, particularly in the area of hunting and fishing licenses, but that’s the exception rather than the rule.) I’m assuming you can go to the next county over and get a license, but that’s not really the point. The clerk’s office is there to support the citizens of that county and if the law says that licenses must be issued there is an obvious conflict when the clerk herself refuses to do so. (This is different than the situation with judges refusing to perform marriages, as we recently discussed, since that’s an optional side “business” for them.)

It seems unfair to the clerk, but I don’t see how the courts can find in favor of Kim Davis. While it’s a most unsatisfactory answer, I think people in her position will simply have to find other work when this finishes making its way through the appeal process.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/08/18/rowan-county-kentuckys-last-stand-on-gay-marriage-licenses/feed/1493873908Will the First Amendment Defense Act fall victim to Beltway elbow-throwing?http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/13/will-the-first-amendment-defense-act-fall-victim-to-beltway-elbow-throwing/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/13/will-the-first-amendment-defense-act-fall-victim-to-beltway-elbow-throwing/#commentsMon, 13 Jul 2015 14:01:21 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3869627The headline on this report from The Hill sounds optimistic: “‘Religious freedom’ bill picks up momentum in House.” The report itself sounds less than sunny, however, as Scott Wong notes that progress on the First Amendment Defense Act (FADA) may get slowed or stopped altogether because of a long-simmering feud among House Republicans. The primary sponsor of FADA has run afoul of leadership in the past, and some worry that might create roadblocks:

Given the Supreme Court ruling last month legalizing same-sex marriage, many Republicans say they hope to pass the bill before they head home and face constituents at August town halls.

But there’s one possible hang-up: The bill’s author is Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho), a co-founder of the conservative Freedom Caucus, which has caused fits for GOP leadership since its launch in January. Labrador, a Tea Party favorite, also is a one-time rival to Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who just happens to control the floor schedule.

Labrador sounded hopeful:

But in an interview, Labrador said he spoke directly to top Boehner aides and McCarthy on Friday, and they assured him they were not trying to derail his bill.

“They are not threatening me personally about my bill. They assured me legislation that is important will go to the floor, so I take them at their word,” Labrador told The Hill. “McCarthy assured me he’s not trying to get in the way of the bill.”

Wong notes that the schedule isn’t favorable to a quick vote. Labrador’s bill has been referred to both Ways and Means and Oversight and Government Reform, but neither has scheduled a mark-up of the bill. McCarthy hasn’t committed to a vote before the August recess, and it’s fair to assume that most of the legislative calendar in the fall will be focused on the budget rather than FADA. If the bill doesn’t clear committees soon and get a floor vote, it might sit in limbo for quite a long time.

The bill would keep the IRS from taking any action against churches and religious organizations who decline to participate in same-sex wedding events as contrary to their faith. It would not, however, extend to the cases that have emerged in the struggle between religious expression and public accommodation laws, which are at the state level. Mark Hemingway gives us a rundown of the most well-known disputes:

* On July 7, Jack Phillips, another baker, this time in Colorado, appealed the state civil rights commission’s ruling against him for refusing to serve a same-sex couple. The pair wanted a rainbow-themed cake. Phillips argued he could not be forced to make a cake that communicated a message he did not agree with. A Colorado civil rights commissioner compared Phillips’s argument to those employed by Nazis and slave owners.

* In Washington state, the attorney general is suing florist Barronelle Stutzman, 70, for refusing to provide flowers for a same-sex wedding. The gay would-be customer was a longtime friend with whom she had done business for nine years. Stutzman and the customer were so close they hugged each other after she informed him she couldn’t make a cake for his wedding. The customer did not initially press charges, and the state attorney general initiated the case on his own after hearing about it on social media. One of Stutzman’s former employees, who is gay and a same-sex marriage supporter, has filed an affadavit on her behalf. But now the ACLU and national gay rights organizations have taken up the case against her. The state attorney general and the aggrieved customer are not just suing her business, but going after her personal assets.

* Hands On Originals, a printer in Kentucky, ran afoul of a local human rights commission for refusing to print T-shirts for a gay organization. He was told that he had to use his printing press to print messages he disagreed with. After years of administrative proceedings, a state court ruled in the printer’s favor in April: “It is clear beyond dispute that [Hands On Originals] and its owners declined to print the T-shirts in question because of the message advocating sexual activity outside of a marriage between one man and one woman.” That ruling is being appealed to a higher court.

* In Atlanta, the city’s African-American fire chief Kelvin Cochran was summarily fired after he published a book about helping Christian men avoid sexual temptation. The 162-page book scarcely mentioned homosexual activity but did include it in a list of sexual sins. Cochran’s job record is spotless; he was previously the top fire-fighting appointee in the Obama administration and was named Fire Chief of the Year in 2012. But tolerance has its limits. Atlanta city council member Alex Wan explained, “I respect each individual’s right to have their own thoughts, beliefs, and opinions, but when you’re a city employee and those thoughts, beliefs, and opinions are different from the city’s, you have to check them at the door.” The Alliance Defending Freedom filed a federal lawsuit earlier this year to get Cochran reinstated.

Just as with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), it would likely take state-level FADAs to inoculate against these kinds of actions in the future. The current FADA would at least keep progressives from using the massively destructive power of the IRS to destroy churches and the benefits they provide to American communities, which is one key reason why the tax exemption exists in the first place. Republican leadership in both the House and Senate should expedite the process for FADA, and perhaps set an example for the states to follow.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/13/will-the-first-amendment-defense-act-fall-victim-to-beltway-elbow-throwing/feed/523869627Religion: The new Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell?http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/09/religion-the-new-dont-ask-dont-tell/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/09/religion-the-new-dont-ask-dont-tell/#commentsThu, 09 Jul 2015 18:01:42 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3869203I’ve been working on research this week and mostly away from the moment-to-moment of politics, but I’ve spent much of the time reflecting on the impact of the Obergefell decision on people of faith. We had already begun to see the beginnings of a campaign against secular heretics in the last couple of years, aimed at bakers, florists, and photographers in the private market. The ruling elite are already moving to the next phase of this attack on faith, attempting to rewrite the freedom of religious expression to limit it within the four walls of churches and other houses of worship.

“Certainly the First Amendment says that in institutions of faith that there is absolute power to observe deeply held religious beliefs,” Senator Tammy Baldwin explained to MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki, “but I don’t think it extends far beyond that.” Baldwin objected to the idea that religious liberty applies to the manner in which Americans choose to live their lives. “They’re talking about expanding this far beyond our churches and synagogues to businesses and individuals across this country,” she warned. “I think there are clear limits that have been set in other contexts and we ought to abide by those in this new context across America.”

For my column today at The Fiscal Times, I note that this is a complete deviation from the historical application of the First Amendment. In the midst of two of the worst national conflicts in human history, the freedom of religious expression not only allowed for the refusal to engage in private transactions without government penalty, but also exempted Americans from participation in its national defense — the highest and most compelling state interest:

Religious liberty is the ability to put one’s faith into action in the public sphere, both organizationally and individually, both in choosing to take action and in choosing to refrain from participation. The latter has taken many forms in American history, among those the notable exception from compulsory military service by religious orders that demand pacifism, such as Quakers.

Even when our nation’s security is at stake, we have defined the free exercise of religion to include the right to refuse to participate in war, and specifically as individuals. That exercise didn’t just get limited to the ability to advocate for pacifism, but also to practice it in wartime – which hardly qualified as a popular position in most wars, either.

If we exempt participation in war because of free exercise of religion, why should government compel participation in weddings that violate the tenets of their faith? The government’s interest in compelling national service, especially in wartime, far outstrips the need to force participation in a private event.

Not all Quakers refused military service, just as some Christians have no problem with serving at same-sex wedding ceremonies. The participation of some Quakers in military service did not impact the right of others to opt out of military service, even though that exemption has almost always been terribly unpopular during these conflicts. If the right of free religious expression outweighs the compelling state interest in self-defense, especially when the nation has been attacked as it was in World War II, how can anyone claim that the First Amendment can only be contained to houses of worship when it comes to a wedding?

To extend the point even further, the ability to refuse to participate in national defense stopped being limited by religious faith fifty years ago. In the 1965 Seeger decision, the Supreme Court ruled that consistent and principled pacifism did not have to be associated with a particular denomination to refuse to participate in military service. So if anyone who has a principled stand against military force can avoid a national draft in defense of the state, why are we forcing bakers and photographers to participate in private events that violate their consistently applied values by the threat of devastating economic penalties from the government?

What Baldwin and the Left wants to impose is a nationwide Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT) policy, where religious faith must only be practiced in private, and not lived in the world, which is exactly the opposite of the historical and precedential understanding of the First Amendment. That new DADT regime even now extends to the military, where chaplains get disciplined for advocating their religion and using Christian scripture. It is a new form of the excesses of the French revolution, when freedom got redefined as the necessity of complete adherence to the prevailing consensus — and everyone else either shut up or lost their livelihoods or their heads.

As always, your thoughts are appreciated.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/09/religion-the-new-dont-ask-dont-tell/feed/693869203A rebuttal to the Right Reverend Jimmy Carterhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/08/a-rebuttal-to-the-right-reverend-jimmy-carter/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/08/a-rebuttal-to-the-right-reverend-jimmy-carter/#commentsWed, 08 Jul 2015 13:21:37 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3868987Finally, Jimmy Carter has answered the question that has long vexed Christian theologians! Allahpundit posted about this yesterday, but (a) it’s a new day, and (b) I’d like a crack at this from a theological point of view. When asked in a Huffington Post interview whether Jesus would approve of same-sex marriage, the former president felt informed enough to pontificate in the affirmative on the question, even while admitting that he had no scriptural basis for his conclusion. That’s … an odd kind of Christian theology, to say the least.

There’s also a larger parallel to the legal machinations that took place in Obergefell in this clip:

HP: Would Jesus approve gay marriage?

CARTER: I believe – I believe He would, I believe Jesus would. I don’t have any verse and Scripture —

HP: No, but — just intuitively, yeah.

CARTER: I believe that Jesus would approve gay marriage. But I’m not — that’s just my own personal opinion. I think Jesus would encourage any kind of love affair if it was honest and sincere, and was not damaging to anyone else, and I don’t see that gay marriage damages anyone else.

Actually, we do have some hints on how Jesus might view same-sex marriage, as well as “love affairs” outside of traditional marriage, regardless of their sincerity. This came up not long ago in a Twitter debate on this very point I had with a SSM activist, who claimed that Jesus never talked about the composition of marriage. In Matthew 19:3-9, Jesus speaks directly to the role of marriage in God’s plan, and the role of complementarity in its composition:

And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one’? So they are no longer two but one. What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder.” They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?” He said to them, “For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another, commits adultery; and he who marries a divorced woman, commits adultery.”

Note that Jesus in Scripture not only clearly highlights marriage as one man and one woman, He also reminds the Pharisees that the complementarity of opposite genders was a purposeful part of creation, and in God’s plan. Jesus says nothing about honesty and sincerity being prevailing qualities, nor of whether the sin of adultery in the case of divorce is mitigated by the fact that it might not hurt anyone else. The same conversation occurs in Mark 10:1-12, and a hint of it also appears in Luke 16:18. The Gospel writers understood this lesson on the immutability of complementary sacramental marriage to be an important part of Jesus’ teaching, one that even “red-letter Christians” cannot easily dismiss.

That isn’t the only place in which Jesus discusses marriage. Another Gospel passage undermines Carter’s argument about Jesus caring more about not bothering other people than marriage as an institution. In John 4, Jesus stops in Samaria and begins having a conversation with a woman at the well, a tremendous breach of custom between Jews and Samaritans in those days. He tells the woman to call her husband, which sets up this rebuke:

The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and he whom you now have is not your husband; this you said truly.”

If the standard here was just “not damaging anyone else,” Jesus would not have made an issue of the woman’s adultery. She convinces her neighbors to come hear him by telling them, “He told me all that I ever did,” not exactly a recognition of praise.

Any Christian with a passing familiarity of the gospels should already know this. (There’s also the matter of Paul’s scriptural teaching in 1 Corinthians 6:9, but we’ll keep this limited to Jesus Christ for now.) But Carter isn’t really engaging in “honest and sincere” exegesis; he’s simply replacing the text of Scripture for an “intuitively” derived rationalization to support Carter’s political point of view. The HuffPo interviewer wanted a talking point about Christ supporting same-sex marriage, and Carter obliged him with easily the lamest possible answer. It’s utter nonsense, especially since Carter could just easily say that what Jesus would do in this instance is immaterial, because the context here is secular law as opposed to theology. That at least would be “honest and sincere.”

By the way, one has to wonder why the HuffPo interviewer is so keen to hear that Jesus is totes kewl with SSM. Why should it matter to him or anyone else who doesn’t want religion informing public policy? Why not just stick to the secular arguments?

This also speaks to the kind of legal thinking that went into the Obergefell decision itself. Rather than rely on precedent which argued against taking such a position, Kennedy instead relied on his own “reasoned judgment” to decide that the cultural moment for SSM had arrived, not unlike Carter’s “reasoned judgment” about Jesus’ approach to marriage. Kennedy also gave a lot of airy paeans to honesty, sincerity, and the lack of damage SSM would do to others, notably other marriage and society itself. But those are questions for legislatures, not for courts, and certainly not for the intuition of five unelected and unaccountable jurists. The reliance on the “reasoned judgment” to overturn more than 230 years of legal precedent for keeping marriage a matter for the states bodes just as ill for the Republic as Reverend Carter’s mini-sermon does for theology.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/08/a-rebuttal-to-the-right-reverend-jimmy-carter/feed/1603868987It begins, maybe: Montana trio apply for marriage license, threaten suithttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/02/it-begins-maybe-montana-trio-apply-for-marriage-license-threaten-suit/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/02/it-begins-maybe-montana-trio-apply-for-marriage-license-threaten-suit/#commentsThu, 02 Jul 2015 22:41:30 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3868414I wonder what took them so long. Three business days after the Obergefell decision that recognized same-sex marriage as a constitutional right, Nathan Collier decided to demand that the Montana state government recognize that love is love … is love. And if they don’t issue a marriage license to formally recognize his plural arrangement, Collier says he intends to sue:

A Montana man said Wednesday that he was inspired by last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage to apply for a marriage license so that he can legally wed his second wife.

Nathan Collier and his wives Victoria and Christine applied at the Yellowstone County Courthouse in Billings on Tuesday in an attempt to legitimize their polygamous marriage. Montana, like all 50 states, outlaws bigamy — holding multiple marriage licenses — but Collier said he plans to sue if the application is denied.

“It’s about marriage equality,” Collier told The Associated Press Wednesday. “You can’t have this without polygamy.”

This isn’t a stunt for Collier, or at least not just a stunt. He told the AP that he had been a Mormon until the church excommunicated him for polygamy, a policy on which the Latter-Day Saints have taken a hard line for a very long time. Collier married his legal wife in 2000, and then committed to the woman he calls his second wife in 2007 in “a religious ceremony,” as the AP describes it. The trio came out of the shadows of polygamy by making a recent appearance on the reality show Sister Wives, deciding at that point to become activists.

Interestingly, Collier says that he has asked the ACLU to represent them if they go to court over a refusal to issue a marriage license that includes all three of them. The ACLU announced in the wake of the Obergefell decision that they would no longer support the Religious Freedom Restoration Act because of the supposedly hateful motivations behind its use, which seems rather ironic considering that the group defended the right of neo-Nazis to parade through Skokie, Illinois a few decades ago. The ACLU’s legal director told the AP that he hadn’t seen the request, but that Obergefell was “about something very different.”

Was it? If Collier gets his way, we may find out in the next few years, and it’s all but certain Collier won’t be alone in his efforts. The popularity of reality television shows like Sister Wives,Married & Dating, the sort-of polygamy apologia of the fictional series Big Love on HBO (which has also aired documentaries on abuses in polygamy), and celebrity defenses of polyamory may have reset the American moral perspective on plural relationships involving adults. Let’s recall how the majority opinion addressed that issue in the Obergefell decision written by Justice Anthony Kennedy:

But other, more instructive precedents have expressed broader principles. See, e.g., Lawrence, supra, at 574. In assessing whether the force and rationale of its cases apply to same-sex couples, the Court must respect the basic reasons why the right to marry has been long protected. See, e.g., Eisenstadt, supra, at 453–454. This analysis compels the conclusion that same-sex couples may exercise the right to marry. …

Finally, this Court’s cases and the Nation’s traditions make clear that marriage is a keystone of the Nation’s social order. See Maynard v. Hill, 125 U. S. 190, 211. States have contributed to the fundamental character of marriage by placing it at the center of many facets of the legal and social order. There is no difference between same- and opposite-sex couples with respect to this principle, yet same-sex couples are denied the constellation of benefits that the States have linked to marriage and are consigned to an instability many opposite-sex couples would find intolerable. It is demeaning to lock same-sex couples out of a central institution of the Nation’s society, for they too may aspire to the transcendent purposes of marriage.

The limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples may long have seemed natural and just, but its inconsistency with the central meaning of the fundamental right to marry is now manifest.

In other words, Marriage Itself is so valuable that it can’t be contained to a particular definition, especially when it’s “demeaning” to be locked outside of the definition that made Marriage Itself “a keystone of the Nation’s social order.” Exactly what, in this reasoning, restricts the form of marriage to two people? Chief Justice John Roberts asked the same question in his dissent, noting that the opinion “offers no reason at all why the two-person element of the core definition of marriage may be preserved while the man-woman element may not. Indeed,” Roberts continues, “from the standpoint of history and tradition, a leap from opposite-sex marriage to same-sex marriage is much greater than one from a two-person union to plural unions, which have deep roots in some cultures around the world.”

Returning to Kennedy, the reasoning for granting constitutional protection to the right of government recognition for same-sex marriages relies entirely on the evolution of moral positioning in culture:

Until the mid-20th century, same-sex intimacy long had been condemned as immoral by the state itself in most Western nations, a belief often embodied in the criminal law. For this reason, among others, many persons did not deem homosexuals to have dignity in their own distinct identity. A truthful declaration by same-sex couples of what was in their hearts had to remain unspoken. …

In the late 20th century, following substantial cultural and political developments, same-sex couples began to lead more open and public lives and to establish families. This development was followed by a quite extensive discussion of the issue in both governmental and private sectors and by a shift in public attitudes toward greater tolerance. As a result, questions about the rights of gays and lesbians soon reached the courts, where the issue could be discussed in the formal discourse of the law.

This is why Justice Antonin Scalia blasted the majority decision as one that turns the court into a “super-legislative” body rather than a judicial body. The role of adapting law to changing moral consensuses is that of a legislature, which creates, modifies, and repeals laws, and not to the courts which enforce and interpret them. In a constitutional republic, changing moral consensuses will produce a change in laws, as we saw in several states over the last decade on this very question.

Let’s return to the Collier case with Kennedy’s argument in mind. The threshold for changing the definition under the Equal Protection Clause, according to Kennedy, is “substantial cultural and political developments,” as well as a change in moral consensus based on relationship models coming out of the shadows. How can this not apply to Collier and other plural relationships involving consenting adults? One might argue that the culture hasn’t changed sufficiently to support legalizing plural marriage — that’s essentially David Frum’s argument today — but that’s entirely a matter of timing and taste, not law. Tilda Swinton, Maria Bello, and other celebrities are openly living in polyamorous relationships outside of the shadows without undue harm, just as same-sex couples have for the last few decades. How long until social tolerance of those relationships qualify them for the “keystone of the Nation’s social order”? Twenty years? Ten? Two?

That’s exactly why the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell is such a violation of the separation of powers in the Constitution. If five of the nine justices think that the moral calculus has changed enough, then presto! a new constitutional right has been born. If four or less think so, then suddenly the post-Lawrence embrace of government celebration of the choices of consenting adults no longer applies. It’s entirely a matter of whim, not law. The Supreme Court will have to make the exact same kind of value distinction that some states made in restricting government recognition of marriage to its traditional definition, a moral distinction which the Supreme Court found illegitimate, to bar plural marriages after Obergefell.

The larger lesson of all this is that we should refrain from giving courts this entree into defining our social structure in the first place. The government should get out of the marriage business and stick to contracts, leaving the issue of what constitutes marriage to the private sector, especially houses of worship. One major denomination changed its definition of marriage today, showing (if nothing else) that market forces create organic change and choice without applying government force:

The Episcopal Church says it will permit weddings for same-sex couples after members approved the change at a meeting of its governing body.

The decision by the church, which has about 1.9 million members in the United States, follows the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision last week to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide. …

The convention’s House of Deputies, which is made up of clergy and lay members, voted strongly in favor of two key resolutions Wednesday.

One removed from church canons language that defined marriage being as between a man and a woman; the other approved two new liturgies adapted for both same-sex and opposite-sex marriages.

Some Episcopalians threatened a schism over the new policy, and they may well either create a new form of Episcopalianism or perhaps individually join other existing offshoots within the Anglican communion or even the Catholic Church, which is liturgically similar. That will be their choice, based on what they believe about Christian doctrine on marriage, which is the legitimate jurisdiction of faith. Quite clearly, leaving it in the hands of government appears to be both the most unstable and most dangerous place in which it would rest.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/02/it-begins-maybe-montana-trio-apply-for-marriage-license-threaten-suit/feed/2253868414Is it too late to get the government out of marriage?http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/30/is-it-too-late-to-get-the-government-out-of-marriage/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/30/is-it-too-late-to-get-the-government-out-of-marriage/#commentsTue, 30 Jun 2015 19:21:42 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3868154Yesterday, Rand Paul articulated a path forward after Obergefell that would provide equal treatment under the law while preserving the free exercise of religion, which is to get government out of the marriage business. “All Americans have the right to contract,” Paul wrote, and enforcing contracts falls clearly within the purview of government. By defining social constructs, Paul warns, creates “a danger that a government that involves itself in every nook and cranny of our lives won’t now enforce definitions that conflict with sincerely felt religious convictions of others.”

But nowhere in the social service realm are government and religion closer than in marriage. In every jurisdiction in the U.S., ordained ministers have the authority to certify that a marriage has taken place, once the necessary licensing has been completed by the state or local jurisdiction. Even more than in the above examples, the minister acts in place of the state, as its agent in the finalization of the legal process. Rather than having a strict separation of church and state, the two have been joined in wedlock all along, especially when it comes to marriage. …

The Supreme Court’s sweeping gay marriage ruling makes the problem exponentially worse. By declaring government recognition of same-sex marriage a constitutional right rather than just voting it in as a popular decision for government policy, it sets up the state to intervene in the doctrine of houses of worship to force a change in their definitions of marriage. Even RFRA may not suffice to protect religious liberty in this case, now that the balancing test pits one constitutional right against another. Already some are calling for churches that refuse to comply to get penalized through the loss of tax exemptions, and Kennedy’s opinion makes it clear that the majority only envision the rights of religious groups and individuals to “advocate” for traditional marriage. For many smaller groups, a loss of tax exemption would wipe them out — and all of the other good work they do in their communities. Those who comply would exist in a similar space as “official” churches in authoritarian nations such as China, where compliance with government edicts is the price to pay for avoiding closure by the state, through one means or another. …

[Paul’s proposal] would keep government intervention in domestic relationships between consenting adults limited to enforcing contracts, a task for which self-government is designed, and keep them out of the business of official recognition and regulation of love, an arena few in either camp would normally leave to bureaucrats in any other circumstances. Those who wish to have their unions blessed as marriage could test the market for houses of worship with definitions that embrace those relationships, while those who do not wish to participate in such events could just be left alone.

Here’s the problem with this proposal. It sounded radical in 2008, but now it sounds reactionary, a kind of “sour grapes” post-Obergefell. People who opposed this a few years ago now might grasp it as a last-gasp attempt to head off disaster, while those who felt themselves on the short end of public policy in 2008 will see no need to change things after last week’s reversal in fortune. The latter will claim, with some justification, that the limited-government principle matters less to conservatives now than the fact that their definition of marriage no longer applies.

And that’s the charitable way to see the changed political environment. David Harsanyi, who supported legal recognition of same-sex marriage for years, wonders whether he made a mistake not on the merits, but on the forces it has unleashed:

I’ve supported same-sex marriage ever since I first heard the idea. And when I became a political columnist in the early 2000s—despite being the “conservative” at a good-sized newspaper—I was the only one at the paper (as far as I can recall) who unequivocally backed gay marriage publicly. Though I wasn’t gullible enough to believe I’d be persuading many readers, I was gullible enough to believe that my allies in the cause were merely concerned with “equality.” …

Do a majority of Americans support gay marriage because they have a desire to see civil society overtaken by the administrative state? Because it only took a few hours after the Obergefell v. Hodges decision for Time to publish a piece by New York Times columnist Mark Oppenheimer suggesting government shouldn’t be “subsidizing” religion or non-profits at all. The point, of course, is to punish churches for being a bunch of intolerant nits who are holding up progress. The word “subsidize” suggests that parishioners are receiving checks from taxpayers when, of course, what Oppenheimer really means to say is that these silly people are handing money to reactionary institutions rather than the most progressive church of all …

he evangelical florist is discriminating against the gay couple in the same way Jeffery Toobin is discriminating against the Catholic who asks him to write a column defending the unborn. The liberty interest being asserted by the florist is choosing not to participate in an event because of a religious consideration. The florist is not turning anyone away because they are gay. On the other hand, government will be forcing the florist to surrender his faith or his business.

How many backers of theoretical gay marriage will regret the reality of gay marriage? As a matter of policy, it doesn’t matter much anymore. And I have no moral qualms about same-sex marriage itself. I don’t believe it destabilizes the institution or ruins the lives of children. Then again, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, either. If same-sex marriage isn’t just a pathway to happiness, freedom, and equality for gay citizens, but a way to pummel religious Americans into submission, it will be a disaster.

The first few days’ reactions inform us that Obergefell is not the end, but the beginning. And that’s why it might be too late to get government out of the marriage business. It just handed a very big club to those who want to coerce the religious into what’s known as freedom of worship rather than the free exercise of religion that the First Amendment protects. It will be used as a weapon against government’s partners in marriage, and it won’t stop until churches become state-approved or state-persecuted.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/30/is-it-too-late-to-get-the-government-out-of-marriage/feed/963868154Kurtz: Golly, the media have turned into an intolerant mob latelyhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/30/kurtz-golly-the-media-have-turned-into-an-intolerant-mob-lately/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/30/kurtz-golly-the-media-have-turned-into-an-intolerant-mob-lately/#commentsTue, 30 Jun 2015 16:01:05 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3868110Some here would take issue with “lately,” but there’s no doubt now that the activism of media outlets has become impossible to ignore, especially after the orgy of media self-congratulation over the last few days. Fox’s Howard Kurtz argues that the Obergefell decision in particular has exposed the extent to which agenda journalism has permeated reporting, and not just opinion journalism. “Some journalists just come out and say it,” Kurtz notes, by saying that “there aren’t two sides in the gay marriage debate.” There are two sides, but the media is purposefully ignoring or marginalizing one side by painting it as bigotry:

I fully understand why same-sex marriage in particular is viewed as a triumph, in a country that no longer denies two people in love the right to wed. But not only was the Supreme Court divided 5 to 4, some 40 percent of the country is still opposed to gay marriage—for either personal or religious reasons–and their views should be accorded some respect.

Some journalists just come out and say it: there aren’t two sides in the gay marriage debate.

Most news organizations have so tilted their coverage in favor of the court’s ruling that you might get the impression that only an extreme few think differently.

Yet public opinion was very different when Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, and even when George W. Bush pushed a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage in 2004. Barack Obama’s position until the spring of 2012 was that marriage is between a man and a woman.

Now those who still believe that are being told, in effect, that they are not just wrong but immoral.

Conservatives will find themselves amused by this belated recognition of a phenomenon that has been well documented for nearly two decades. As early as 1996, former CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg openly discussed how editorial bias and agendas were perverting journalism, at first in a Wall Street Journal essay and later in his seminal book Bias, for which I wrote an introduction in the 2014 re-release. The difference today is that journalists have stopped pretending that their news coverage takes a political point of view. Rainbow flags popped up in media outlets all weekend long, not as coverage of events but as statements by the outlets in their news sections rather than opinion, which Kurtz notes. Interestingly, Kurtz never even gets to the baldest and boldest declaration of the “one side only” declarations, the execrable PennLive/Patriot-News editorial that equated Obergefell dissent with racism and anti-Semitism, and the insincere walkback from editor John Micek. Then again, perhaps Kurtz has too many examples to air them all out in a four-minute segment.

“Many of us [in the media] do live in a bubble,” Kurtz points out. It’s a self-imposed and self-perpetuating echo chamber of elites more than a “bubble,” which makes it sound somewhat less intentional. The worst part of this hypocrisy is the insistence, even with this blatant manipulation, that we take their reporting at face value rather than question their motives. If the mainstream media thinks that will fly, then they’re really living in a bubble.

Kurtz also misses another point, which is that the moral posturing about the opinions of their readers usually involves a heaping helping of hypocrisy. Hugh Hewitt challenged BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith about his publication’s endorsement of SSM in its news coverage as well as its opinion pieces, and asked whether Smith extended the outlet’s moral preening on other issues.

HH: Do you guys take positions, this leads me to the harder stuff for you now. Do you guys take positions on Castro being evil?

BS: You know, we, no, and this isn’t, we’re not in the position to take, like that this is often, I emailed you this before, and this is why I was initially reluctant to go on and was hiding out in Latvia, which is that when people who, when, I am sort of a connoisseur of really cringe-inducing interviews where the editor of the New York Times talks to an ideological, somebody who really cares a lot about ideology and comes across sounding really squirrely, because people who spend their time thinking about news are often kind of inarticulate on matters of ideology. It’s not the thing they’ve spent a lot of time on. They’re not that interesting in it. And instrumentally, as a journalist, it gets in the way. And so you know, and this is what I always tell our reporters. Like don’t, try not to use the word outrageous in a headline, because if something’s outrageous, the reader ought to read this thing and come away and say hey, this is outrageous, and shouldn’t need to be told. You know, we should, we cover horrific things happening in the world. We do not add paragraphs saying by the way, a mass rape by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia was evil. That’s just not our job. We report on it.

HH: I know, but when you report, for example, on Saudi Arabia, you’re reporting on a state that refuses Christians to practice their faith. You’re reporting on a state that beheads people. You’re reporting on a state that embraces Shariah. Do you have an editorial judgment that that is an evil state? Or is that not within, is that again above your pay grade?

BS: Hugh, that’s not the business. I mean, the value that we add is the reporting, as I see it, and so that’s what we try to do.

HH: So can you articulate for me, and I get it, I think I get it, but can you articulate for me what is the different between the need to announce on LGBT equality and the need not to announce on Shariah-governed states?

[Long silence]

BS: That’s a really good question.

Be sure to read it all, because Smith comes up with a lengthy answer that entirely misses Hugh’s subtle point. The media is awfully quick to paint Americans as bigots and equivalent racists for having a heterodox opinions on same-sex marriage, but they’re pretty silent about the moral character of regimes that toss gays and lesbians off of roofs as a matter of public policy in order to maintain their supposed objectivity and sensitivity to multicultural concerns. It’s interesting to see where and when the media is willing to allow for two sides on an issue.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/30/kurtz-golly-the-media-have-turned-into-an-intolerant-mob-lately/feed/813868110The gay marriage debate has been wrong from the beginninghttp://hotair.com/theres-always-an-option-3/2015/06/28/the-gay-marriage-debate-has-been-wrong-from-the-beginning/
http://hotair.com/theres-always-an-option-3/2015/06/28/the-gay-marriage-debate-has-been-wrong-from-the-beginning/#commentsSun, 28 Jun 2015 22:31:17 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3867963The problem with the gay marriage debate is the insistence to have it on just two grounds. You’re either for gay marriage or against it. There’s no so-called “Option 3” discussion where both sides have a chance to be partially satisfied. This involves getting the government 100% out of marriage. It’s something Ed Morrissey and Jazz Shaw have both advocated here at Hot Air and they’re right. Marriage should be privatized.

Ed’s 2012 piece discussing his “Yes” vote on the Minnesota marriage ballot initiative is worth a re-read because he really provides a powerful argument into why marriage privatization should happen, especially to protect churches (emphasis mine):

Right now, churches act as agents of the state in conducting weddings. For those who think that a change in definition would not inevitably lead to mandates on churches to “not discriminate” in conducting ceremonies for those relationships which violate their religious doctrines hasn’t been paying attention to the HHS mandate. In that case, the federal government will force religious organizations (schools, charities, health-care providers) to violate their doctrines by facilitating access to contraception and sterilization, and that’s without the added lever of acting in stead of the state, as churches do when officiating at weddings. Instead of leaving marriage to the churches, a change in definition will give the state a powerful way to either force churches to perform weddings that violate their belief systems or stop performing them altogether.

Edi isn’t the only one to have this fear. Michigan Congressman Justin Amash echoed Ed on Facebook over the gay marriage ruling:

Those who care about liberty should not be satisfied with the current situation. Government intervention in marriage presents new threats to religious freedom and provides no advantages, for gay or straight couples, over unlicensed (i.e., traditional) marriage. But we shouldn’t blame the Supreme Court for where things stand.

It’s not just “straight, white Republican men” who feel this way. Meredith Ancret is a conservative who is also a lesbian. From her blog:

My main fear with this case was that it might be used as legal precedent to violate the 1st amendment and force religious institutions/leaders to host/perform gay marriages.
Though it may of course spawn legal challenges, I don’t believe it sets up precedent to force religious leaders to be involved in solemnizing any marriage they do not wish to be involved in.

The biggest problem is how emotional the debate has become. Facebook is full of people with rainbow-colored avatars, while other supporters talk about the “buzz” they’re feeling because of the Supreme Court’s decision. Opponents say Friday’s decision shows the Supreme Court is undermining their legitimacy. Rod Dreher has a Timearticle where he writes the sky isn’t falling, but it’s basically falling (emphasis mine):

One can certainly understand the joy that LGBT Americans and their supporters feel today. But orthodox Christians must understand that things are going to get much more difficult for us. We are going to have to learn how to live as exiles in our own country. We are going to have to learn how to live with at least a mild form of persecution. And we are going to have to change the way we practice our faith and teach it to our children, to build resilient communities.

He’s right and wrong on this part. There is some discrimination against religious groups at Cal State because of the university’s stupid so-called “non discrimination” rules. But it’s doubtful Christian families are going to have to change the way their faith is practiced or how it’s taught to their children. There’s nothing wrong with being vigilant, but Dreher’s hyperbole needs to be dialed back a notch:

Obergefell is a sign of the times, for those with eyes to see. This isn’t the view of wild-eyed prophets wearing animal skins and shouting in the desert. It is the view of four Supreme Court justices, in effect declaring from the bench the decline and fall of the traditional American social, political, and legal order.

This is why the marriage privatization debate needs to be considered on the right. By untangling the messy connection between the church and state on marriage, it can actually protect the rights of churches. The good news is marriage privatization is already starting to make headway in some Republican-controlled states. The Oklahoma House and the Alabama Senate both passed bills privatizing marriage. Alabama Senator Greg Albritton explained Senate Bill 377 pretty well during debate:

“When you invite the state into those matters of personal or religious import, it creates difficulties…Go back long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away. Early twentieth century, if you go back and look and try to find marriage licenses for your grandparents or great grandparents, you won’t find it. What you will find instead is where people have come in and recorded when a marriage has occurred.”

His bill passed with both bipartisan support and opposition. It’s anyone’s guess whether the legislation will get anywhere in the Alabama House. But this is why the debate is necessary and why marriage privatization should be considered and advocated. It can protect religious liberties far better than any other piece of legislation. The gay marriage debate has been wrong from the beginning. Hopefully it will now start to right itself and marriage privatization becomes more of a reality.

]]>http://hotair.com/theres-always-an-option-3/2015/06/28/the-gay-marriage-debate-has-been-wrong-from-the-beginning/feed/2543867963ACLU: We’re only interested in protecting some civil rightshttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/27/aclu-were-only-interested-in-protecting-some-civil-rights/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/27/aclu-were-only-interested-in-protecting-some-civil-rights/#commentsSat, 27 Jun 2015 18:31:18 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3867900Come on. How many will truly be surprised to see the American Civil Liberties Union backpedal away from an enumerated civil right in the Constitution, now that the cognoscenti considers it a form of bigotry?

The organization that once went to court to ensure that the American Nazi Party could parade through Skokie, Illinois in an exercise of free speech no longer wants to support the exercise of religion guaranteed in the same First Amendment. The ACLU’s deputy legal director published the organization’s backpedaling from the Religious Freedom Restoration Act the day before the Obergefell decision that will make it even more critical. If it’s not being used to help Muslims in prison and Native Americans in unemployment insurance, writes Louise Melling, just skip it:

The ACLU supported the RFRA’s passage at the time because it didn’t believe the Constitution, as newly interpreted by the Supreme Court, would protect people such as Iknoor Singh, whose religious expression does not harm anyone else. But we can no longer support the law in its current form. For more than 15 years, we have been concerned about how the RFRA could be used to discriminate against others. As the events of the past couple of years amply illustrate, our fears were well-founded. While the RFRA may serve as a shield to protect Singh, it is now often used as a sword to discriminate against women, gay and transgender people and others. Efforts of this nature will likely only increase should the Supreme Court rule — as is expected — that same-sex couples have the freedom to marry. …

Yes, religious freedom needs protection. But religious liberty doesn’t mean the right to discriminate or to impose one’s views on others.

That last declaration is rather curious, considering all of which precedes it in Melling’s argument. She decries its use in the Hobby Lobby case, despite the fact that the HHS contraception mandate is government explicitly imposing its views on the business owners in contradiction to their right to live their faith and their views on abortion and the nature of human life. Melling also objects to RFRA defenses for people like bakers and photographers who are being forced to either participate in same-sex marriage ceremonies that violate their religious tenets or pay massive fines to governments, and in some cases endure “sensitivity training” that forces the government’s views on private citizens. Melling also faults the Catholic Church for receiving government funds to reimburse its service to refugees without knuckling under to government edicts to endorse and facilitate abortions, cooperation with which would prompt excommunication automatically for Catholics.

All of these cases involve government imposing its ideas on citizens, not the other way around. Catholics aren’t physically preventing people from getting abortions; bakers and photographers aren’t stopping people from getting married; Hobby Lobby isn’t preventing its employees from using abortifacients. They are declining to participate in those actions out of sincere religious belief and their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion. The Constitution separates that from the freedom of speech because it doesn’t just encompass speech; if it did, the passage would be entirely redundant. One would think a group so dedicated to “civil liberties” that it defended the right of neo-Nazis to parade past Holocaust survivors would know that.

Note that in each of these cases, RFRA only allows for a stricter scrutiny on government action, allowing for a better defense on government infringement on religious expression. It’s not a Get Out Of Jail Free card, but simply a requirement that judges find that the state interest in these cases is both compelling and serviced by the least intrusive method possible. Courts use RFRA as a balancing test, another point one would assume that the ACLU would have figured out, too. If people use it out of sheer discrimination, courts will reject that use.

The Left is trying to shrink the meaning of the First Amendment’s language. It protects the people from laws “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion, even before protecting speech. “Exercise” means more than just worship, but the ability to live one’s religious beliefs without incurring government penalties for it. Until relatively recently, government actions such as Loving and Griswold removed government interventions in these intimate areas of human interaction, but the HHS contraception mandate and now Obergefell intrude on decisions where Americans rely on religious faith most, both in the marketplace and in homes.

The biggest threat to civil liberties is an ever-growing regulatory state and a government that rules by whim and the current passions of politics. It’s not surprising to conservatives to the ACLU desert the field now that the going has gotten tough. It just confirms our long-standing assessment of the leftist clique.

If the requirement to embrace orthodoxy becomes optional, however, it follows that it is wrong for a church to require that its members believe that there are right and wrong beliefs. Consequently, “when orthodoxy is optional,” as Fr. Neuhaus put it, “it is admitted under a rule of liberal tolerance that cannot help but be intolerant of talk about right and wrong, true and false.”

For this reason, a new “orthodoxy” will arise, one that entails that it is in fact wrong for a church to act as if there are right and wrong theological beliefs. Thus, the cleric who suggests an ecclesiastical trial to prosecute an alleged heretic will be marginalized and punished by his superiors for his suggestion.

Inspired by Fr. Neuhaus’ Law, I’d like to offer my own maxim, one that applies to law, politics, and culture in the same way that Fr. Neuhaus’s applies to theology: “Whenever a practitioner of a traditional vice appeals to the right of privacy as the justification for the state to leave him alone to engage in that vice, he will inevitably demand that the state require that those who morally disapprove of his practice cooperate with it, either materially or formally.”

To which we can add this proviso: Progressive groups who pushed the right of privacy in defense of liberty will be in the vanguard of switching over to demands for forced participation. Looking at you here, ACLU.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/27/aclu-were-only-interested-in-protecting-some-civil-rights/feed/1593867900SCOTUS to churches: Hey, no worries, you can still “advocate” for traditional marriagehttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/26/scotus-to-churches-hey-no-worries-you-can-still-advocate-for-traditional-marriage/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/26/scotus-to-churches-hey-no-worries-you-can-still-advocate-for-traditional-marriage/#commentsFri, 26 Jun 2015 16:01:40 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3867780On this slender thread does the promise of religious liberty hang. Justice Anthony Kennedy, in his majority opinion in Obergefell that declares same-sex marriage a constitutional right, barely mentions the means by which most Americans conduct their weddings — houses of worship. Only on page 27 does Kennedy get around to addressing the connection between church and state, and the assurances in this paragraph are less than compelling, to say the least:

Finally, it must be emphasized that religions, and those who adhere to religious doctrines, may continue to advocate with utmost, sincere conviction that, by divine precepts, same-sex marriage should not be condoned. The First Amendment ensures that religious organizations and persons are given proper protection as they seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths, and to their own deep aspirations to continue the family structure they have long revered. The same is true of those who oppose same-sex marriage for other reasons. In turn, those who believe allowing same sex marriage is proper or indeed essential, whether as a matter of religious conviction or secular belief, may engage those who disagree with their view in an open and searching debate. The Constitution, however, does not permit the State to bar same-sex couples from marriage on the same terms as accorded to couples of the opposite sex.

Uh …. sure, you can still advocate for traditional marriage. You betcha. Where have we heard these protestations of modesty before?

Note here that Kennedy only mentions that houses of worship and those who attend them can still “advocate” against condoning same-sex marriage (SSM). This ignores the long-standing partnership between churches/synagogues/mosques and the government in officiating legally recognized marriage ceremonies. This decision now makes marriage for those same-sex couples a constitutional right, and that will eventually impact those partners for government who officiate such ceremonies.

It won’t be long before lawsuits appear to force churches into performing same-sex weddings, which then becomes a RFRA (Religious Freedom Restoration Act) test against state interests. That’s not going to be a slam dunk for the churches, either — not by a long shot. The state interest in enforcing constitutional rights is presumed to be strong, plus Kennedy’s opinion lists a number of ancillary state interests that makes SSM an Equal Protection Clause issue:

The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. … Without the recognition, stability, and predictability marriage offers, their children suffer the stigma of knowing their families are somehow lesser. They also suffer the significant material costs of being raised by unmarried parents, relegated through no fault of their own to a more difficult and uncertain family life. The marriage laws at issue here thus harm and humiliate the children of same-sex couples.

And pay particular attention to this passage:

Many who deem same-sex marriage to be wrong reach that conclusion based on decent and honorable religious or philosophical premises, and neither they nor their beliefs are disparaged here. But when that sincere, personal opposition becomes enacted law and public policy, the necessary consequence is to put the imprimatur of the State itself on an exclusion that soon demeans or stigmatizes those whose own liberty is then denied.

Will a court, reading this holding, decide that the harm of this “exclusion” and the denial of a constitutional right by an agent of the state in performing weddings override the First Amendment right of free exercise of religion? Some may not, but don’t bet on that as a consistent outcome. Furthermore, the legal challenges that will occur will punish these churches, especially smaller congregationalist entities without significant resources. The process will be the punishment — although I’d bet that the first target will be the Catholic Church, which at least has resources to fight it.

I’d also note that Kennedy, who brought up the topic, could have written explicitly that houses of worship and individuals have a First Amendment right not to participate in these ceremonies. That issue has been raised on a number of occasions in the courts. The absence of any such language sends a very disturbing message on religious freedom, in this and many other contexts.

Chief Justice John Roberts sounded the warning in his dissent:

Federal courts are blunt instruments when it comes to creating rights. They have constitutional power only to resolve concrete cases or controversies; they do not have the flexibility of legislatures to address concerns of parties not before the court or to anticipate problems that may arise from the exercise of a new right. Today’s decision, for example, creates serious questions about religious liberty. Many good and decent people oppose same-sex marriage as a tenet of faith, and their freedom to exercise religion is—unlike the right imagined by the majority— actually spelled out in the Constitution. Amdt. 1. …

The majority’s decision imposing same sex marriage cannot, of course, create any such accommodations. The majority graciously suggests that religious believers may continue to “advocate” and “teach” their views of marriage. Ante, at 27. The First Amendment guarantees, however, the freedom to “exercise” religion. Ominously, that is not a word the majority uses.

Hard questions arise when people of faith exercise religion in ways that may be seen to conflict with the new right to same-sex marriage—when, for example, a religious college provides married student housing only to opposite-sex married couples, or a religious adoption agency declines to place children with same-sex married couples. Indeed, the Solicitor General candidly acknowledged that the tax exemptions of some religious institutions would be in question if they opposed same-sex marriage. See Tr. of Oral Arg. on Question 1, at 36–38. There is little doubt that these and similar questions will soon be before this Court. Unfortunately, people of faith can take no comfort in the treatment they receive from the majority today.

Justice Clarence Thomas also warns that the majority has provided a body blow to religious liberty:

Aside from undermining the political processes that protect our liberty, the majority’s decision threatens the religious liberty our Nation has long sought to protect. …

In our society, marriage is not simply a governmental institution; it is a religious institution as well. Id., at 7. Today’s decision might change the former, but it cannot change the latter. It appears all but inevitable that the two will come into conflict, particularly as individuals and churches are confronted with demands to participate in and endorse civil marriages between same-sex couples.

The majority appears unmoved by that inevitability. It makes only a weak gesture toward religious liberty in a single paragraph, ante, at 27. And even that gesture indicates a misunderstanding of religious liberty in our Nation’s tradition. Religious liberty is about more than just the protection for “religious organizations and persons . . . as they seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths.” Ibid. Religious liberty is about freedom of action in matters of religion generally, and the scope of that liberty is directly correlated to the civil restraints placed upon religious practice.7

Although our Constitution provides some protection against such governmental restrictions on religious practices, the People have long elected to afford broader protections than this Court’s constitutional precedents mandate. Had the majority allowed the definition of marriage to be left to the political process—as the Constitution requires—the People could have considered the religious liberty implications of deviating from the traditional definition as part of their deliberative process. Instead, the majority’s decision short-circuits that process, with potentially ruinous consequences for religious liberty.

Get ready for a massive legal assault on houses of worship that refuse to accommodate same-sex weddings. Even legislation on the federal and state level may not be able to undo the broad opening that Kennedy et al has forced on the religious institutions and people in the US. It’s clear that the Supreme Court has become unmoored from the Constitution, and in doing so has unmoored all of us as well.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/26/scotus-to-churches-hey-no-worries-you-can-still-advocate-for-traditional-marriage/feed/2363867780Breaking: Supreme Court declares right to same-sex marriagehttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/26/breaking-supreme-court-declares-right-to-same-sex-marriage/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/26/breaking-supreme-court-declares-right-to-same-sex-marriage/#commentsFri, 26 Jun 2015 14:07:38 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3867764In a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has held that the 14th Amendment right to equal protection requires states to allow marriage for same-sex couples. The opinion, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, will strike down any state restrictions for traditional marriage, including those adopted as state-constitution amendments:

Per Kennedy, J.: 14th Amend. requires granting right to SSM and recognizing SSMs performed elsewhere.

The Supreme Court in an historic 5-4 ruling on Friday said there is a right to same-sex marriage in all 50 states, delivering a monumental win for gay and lesbian couples across the country.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, often the swing vote on the court, sided with its more liberal members and authored the decision. …

In the case, known as Obergefell v. Hodges, the court was faced with answering two questions – whether states are required to license a marriage between two people of the same sex and whether states have to recognize same-sex marriage licenses from other states under the 14th Amendment.

That second question is moot after the ruling legalizing same-sex marriage.

The opinion is here, via SCOTUSblog. The core of Kennedy’s argument, legally and philosophically, comes early in it. Not surprisingly to me, Lawrence plays a role in Kennedy’s core argument that marriage is a federal issue, and not a state issue:

Applying these tenets, the Court has long held the right to marry is protected by the Constitution. For example, Loving v. Virginia, 388 U. S. 1, 12, invalidated bans on interracial unions, and Turner v. Safley, 482 U. S. 78, 95, held that prisoners could not be denied the right to marry. To be sure, these cases presumed a relationship involving opposite-sex partners, as did Baker v. Nelson, 409 U. S. 810, a one-line summary decision issued in 1972, holding that the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage did not present a substantial federal question. But other, more instructive precedents have expressed broader principles. See, e.g., Lawrence, supra, at 574. In assessing whether the force and rationale of its cases apply to same-sex couples, the Court must respect the basic reasons why the right to marry has been long protected. See, e.g., Eisenstadt, supra, at 453–454. This analysis compels the conclusion that same-sex couples may exercise the right to marry. …

Finally, this Court’s cases and the Nation’s traditions make clear that marriage is a keystone of the Nation’s social order. See Maynard v. Hill, 125 U. S. 190, 211. States have contributed to the fundamental character of marriage by placing it at the center of many facets of the legal and social order. There is no difference between same- and opposite-sex couples with respect to this principle, yet same-sex couples are denied the constellation of benefits that the States have linked to marriage and are consigned to an instability many opposite-sex couples would find intolerable. It is demeaning to lock same-sex couples out of a central institution of the Nation’s society, for they too may aspire to the transcendent purposes of marriage.

The limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples may long have seemed natural and just, but its inconsistency with the central meaning of the fundamental right to marry is now manifest.

I’ve been arguing ever since Lawrence was decided that it would overturn all sorts of laws, as well as federalize most social issues. Lawrence overturned a rather antiquated but still-used sodomy law in Texas on the basis that it interfered with private conduct between consenting adults, among other issues. Clarence Thomas blasted that decision by noting that stupid laws don’t rise to the level of federal scrutiny just based on their stupidity alone, and that the holding in Lawrence would soon be used to justify federal intervention in many other contexts. And here we are. There are, in fact, twenty-one separate references to Lawrence in this document, most of them in the majority opinion.

Here’s an especially enlightening reference, and a fulfillment of Thomas’ prophecy:

As this Court held in Lawrence, same-sex couples have the same right as opposite-sex couples to enjoy intimate association. Lawrence invalidated laws that made samesex intimacy a criminal act. And it acknowledged that “[w]hen sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring.” 539 U. S., at 567. But while Lawrence confirmed a dimension of freedom that allows individuals to engage in intimate association without criminal liability, it does not follow that freedom stops there. Outlaw to outcast may be a step forward, but it does not achieve the full promise of liberty.

Chief Justice John Riberts wrote the dissent in this case, and he also turns to Lawrence, but to demonstrate the expansion of its doctrine beyond its stated scope. Lawrence attempted to limit government intrusion, Roberts argues, while the majority are now using it for even greater government intrusion:

Neither Lawrence nor any other precedent in the privacy line of cases supports the right that petitioners assert here. Unlike criminal laws banning contraceptives and sodomy, the marriage laws at issue here involve no government intrusion. They create no crime and impose no punishment. Same-sex couples remain free to live together, to engage in intimate conduct, and to raise their families as they see fit. No one is “condemned to live in loneliness” by the laws challenged in these cases—no one. Ante, at 28. At the same time, the laws in no way interfere with the “right to be let alone.”

Roberts also rebuts the claim that the Equal Protection Clause covers this decision:

The majority goes on to assert in conclusory fashion that the Equal Protection Clause provides an alternative basis for its holding. Ante, at 22. Yet the majority fails to provide even a single sentence explaining how the Equal Protection Clause supplies independent weight for its position, nor does it attempt to justify its gratuitous violation of the canon against unnecessarily resolving constitutional questions. See Northwest Austin Municipal Util. Dist. No. One v. Holder, 557 U. S. 193, 197 (2009). In any event, the marriage laws at issue here do not violate the Equal Protection Clause, because distinguishing between opposite-sex and same-sex couples is rationally related to the States’ “legitimate state interest” in “preserving the traditional institution of marriage.” Lawrence, 539 U. S., at 585 (O’Connor, J., concurring in judgment).

It is important to note with precision which laws petitioners have challenged. Although they discuss some of the ancillary legal benefits that accompany marriage, such as hospital visitation rights and recognition of spousal status on official documents, petitioners’ lawsuits target the laws defining marriage generally rather than those allocating benefits specifically. The equal protection analysis might be different, in my view, if we were confronted with a more focused challenge to the denial of certain tangible benefits. Of course, those more selective claims will not arise now that the Court has taken the drastic step of requiring every State to license and recognize marriages between same-sex couples.

Scalia, as is his wont, issued a more scathing concurrence to Roberts, excoriating the “mummeries” of the majority:

We have no basis for striking down a practice that is not expressly prohibited by the Fourteenth Amendment’s text, and that bears the endorsement of a long tradition of open, widespread, and unchallenged use dating back to the Amendment’s ratification. Since there is no doubt whatever that the People never decided to prohibit the limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples, the public debate over same-sex marriage must be allowed to continue.

But the Court ends this debate, in an opinion lacking even a thin veneer of law. Buried beneath the mummeries and straining-to-be-memorable passages of the opinion is a candid and startling assertion: No matter what it was the People ratified, the Fourteenth Amendment protects those rights that the Judiciary, in its “reasoned judgment,” thinks the Fourteenth Amendment ought to protect.13 That is so because “[t]he generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions . . . . ”14 One would think that sentence would continue: “. . . and therefore they provided for a means by which the People could amend the Constitution,” or perhaps “. . . and therefore they left the creation of additional liberties, such as the freedom to marry someone of the same sex, to the People, through the never-ending process of legislation.” But no. What logically follows, in the majority’s judge-empowering estimation, is: “and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.”15 The “we,” needless to say, is the nine of us. “History and tradition guide and discipline [our] inquiry but do not set its outer boundaries.”16 Thus, rather than focusing on the People’s understanding of “liberty”—at the time of ratification or even today—the majority focuses on four “principles and traditions” that, in the majority’s view, prohibit States from defining marriage as an institution consisting of one man and one woman.17

This is a naked judicial claim to legislative—indeed, super-legislative—power; a claim fundamentally at odds with our system of government. Except as limited by a constitutional prohibition agreed to by the People, the States are free to adopt whatever laws they like, even those that offend the esteemed Justices’ “reasoned judgment.” A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.

Note what Scalia says about this being a threat to our democracy. He’s not talking about same-sex marriage; in fact, Scalia praises the debate over the definition of marriage as “American democracy at its best.” What Scalia decries is the court’s move to make itself the arbiter of every social and legal issue, whether or not it falls under the federal government’s purview, by abusing the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, among other devices. It’s legislative power without any check or balance, and goes far beyond the boundaries of what the Constitution imagined as a role for the court, or even what precedent had established until the New Deal era.

All of this was true in Lawrence as well. This is just the fruit of that tree finally ripening, and it won’t be the last of it, either. Just wait for challenges to polygamy bans to rise to the Supreme Court. What in this decision would keep the court from declaring that a right under Lawrence? Tellingly, none of the justices writing today even mentions polygamy at all, which leaves that question wide open for the next test.

Overdue update: In fact, Roberts did mention plural marriage, just not the word “polygamy.” We have a couple of other posts on the topic now, so I’d refer readers to those for further discussion, but my apologies for the oversight.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/26/breaking-supreme-court-declares-right-to-same-sex-marriage/feed/10983867764Social-justice warriors readying a new war on free speech?http://hotair.com/archives/2015/05/21/social-justice-warriors-readying-a-new-war-on-free-speech/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/05/21/social-justice-warriors-readying-a-new-war-on-free-speech/#commentsThu, 21 May 2015 18:41:19 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3863512Last month, the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman reported that backers of same-sex marriage laws will shift their efforts, now that it appears that courts are ready to impose a constitutional right to state recognition of those relationships. The big activists behind the legislative and court fight will start taking aim at other laws, especially those which allow for dissent and choice on participation in such events. The idea is to “protect people from prejudice” on the basis of sexual identity and orientation:

The new effort, Freedom for All Americans — a $5 million-a-year campaign over the next five years — is predicated on the fights around gay marriage, which played out state by state until reaching the Supreme Court in a fight that, advocates hope, will legalize same-sex marriage nationally.

The idea behind FFAA is to eventually get a major federal nondiscrimination bill that protects people from prejudice based on sexuality and gender identity. In the meantime, the group’s backers will fight on a state-by-state level, such as in Indiana, where opponents of Gov. Mike Pence’s religious rights bill worked to force a revision that added gay rights protections.

The new group is a partnership of the American Unity Fund, a super PAC created by the hedge fund executive Paul Singer, as well as the Gill Foundation and the Gill Action Fund. Tim Gill, a Colorado-based Democratic activist and philanthropist, has been a major financial backer of same-sex marriage efforts.

Don’t believe that for a moment, writes Stella Morabito at The Federalist. The activists at FFAA want to declare war on free speech and free association, especially targeting conservatives and Republicans. The FFAA comprises some of the usual suspects in those efforts, Morabito writes, and the end goal is an enforced silence:

Since the Democrats, academia, Hollywood, and the media are already arms of the LGBT lobby, the basic thrust of the American Unity Fund’s “Freedom for All Americans” campaign/slogan/meme is to persuade those darned Republicans and pesky conservatives to set aside their principles and get with the program.

On the surface, this “Freedom for All” slogan sounds innocuous, almost like motherhood (to borrow a quaint notion). Who would ever support discrimination? But this is not your grandfather’s (another quaint notion) Civil Rights Act. Because that old notion of civil rights was back in the days when the First Amendment remained intact for all to enjoy. …

One of the coordinators of the project, hedge fund manager Dan Loeb, told The New York Times that pushing for these laws is “critical in order to change understanding against gays.” In other words, the laws themselves are supposed to lead to a change in the public attitudes. Can laws really do this?

Notwithstanding the awkward construction, Loeb’s statement is loaded. To claim that more anti-discrimination laws are “critical in order to change understanding against gays” basically reveals that the professed purpose of these laws is coercive thought reform.

Laws intended to change how individuals think—about anything—require enforced silencing. If the “Freedom for All Americans” meme is about freedom (which it’s not), then it’s only about negative freedom. That is, freedom from “discrimination.” Freedom from “hate.” Which basically gives carte blanche to those holding power (ultimately, the state) to define and cherry pick whatever “discrimination” and “hate” may mean before granting whatever due process is left over for the accused.

So laws of this sort, hiding under the fig leaf of “anti-discrimination,” will give the state the power to police speech and behaviors.

That seems to be pretty cool with a growing number of Americans, too. Allahpundit called it a “disgrace,” but it’s also an ever-present impulse among those who are so insecure that they can’t handle dissent or criticism. As I write in my column for The Fiscal Times, we’ve toyed with this kind of oppression before, with disastrous consequences:

But how did America finally rid ourselves of the century of oppression of civil rights? Through unfettered use of the freedom of speech. Activists marched at Selma, demonstrated on street corners, took to the airwaves to scold the nation for its indifference, and changed the hearts and minds of Americans through the power of their argument and their truth.

What would have happened had we carved out this rather large exception to the First Amendment in, say, 1945? Had we handed the government the power to determine which speech was “hateful” and which was allowable at that point, would the civil rights movement succeeded as it did? Or would government have simply jailed people for upsetting others through their speech, imprisoning them for “hating” America as it was at that time?

For that matter, consider the anti-war movement that followed that era, in opposition to the Vietnam conflict. How would that movement, with its “America – love it or leave it” counter-response, have unfolded if the federal government decided that it was “hate speech” directed against the military? That could be considered a fair description of a significant amount of that rhetoric at the time.

Some will scoff at that hypothetical, but it actually did take place – fifty years earlier. The Sedition Act of 1918 did precisely that at the end of World War I, and the US prosecuted people for their dissent to the war. Railroad tycoon William Edenborn was arrested for scoffing at the idea that Germany could threaten the national security of the US in much the same manner as others do today about radical jihad in the Middle East.

Eugene Debs, a Socialist organizer, got a ten-year prison sentence for protesting the draft and exhorting people to refuse conscription. The law, along with its parent Espionage Act of 1917, allowed the Postmaster General to dictate the kind of speech that would be delivered. More than 1500 people were arrested for their speech, and only 10 for actual acts or attempts of sabotage.

It’s important to note that the latter example took place in a time of war, but A. Mitchell Palmer wanted the Sedition Act of 1918 extended into peacetime after he saw how easy it was to use for silencing political opposition. (Instead, embarrassed at the abuses, Congress repealed the statutes in 1920.) Censorship, whether it be for “hate speech” or lese majeste, or “insulting the nation,” will always get used to silence people, and to impose a social order by force rather than persuasion. The people who choose it do so usually because their agenda is so unpalatable that they can’t sustain it any other way.

There will always be those who insist that Utopia has to be imposed, that utter equality requires thought police, and that silence is preferable to debate. Their names have been Robespierre, Mao, and Palmer in the past, but Americans used to know better than to fall in line behind them. The social justice thought police has always been with us, but it’s the rising impulse to trade liberty for power among the rest that should have us worried — and speaking out in order to remain able to speak out.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/05/21/social-justice-warriors-readying-a-new-war-on-free-speech/feed/973863512Video: Jindal issues EO to defend religious liberty in Louisianahttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/05/20/video-jindal-issues-eo-to-defend-religious-liberty-in-louisiana/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/05/20/video-jindal-issues-eo-to-defend-religious-liberty-in-louisiana/#commentsWed, 20 May 2015 22:41:44 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3863401Bobby Jindal has threatened for weeks to act if Louisiana’s legislature didn’t move to protect businesses threatened with state sanctions for refusing to participate in same-sex weddings. When Democrats used a procedural move to sideline a bill addressing the issue, Jindal didn’t waste much time. Just hours afterward, he announced that he would sign an executive order forbidding any state enforcement of penalties in those situations:

Gov. Bobby Jindal issued a statement Tuesday (May 19) saying he plans to issue an executive order to enforce the intent of a religious freedom bill that effectively died about two hours earlier, in the House Civil Law and Procedure Committee.

Read the full statement below:

“We are disappointed by the committee’s action to return the Louisiana Marriage and Conscience Act to the calendar. We will be issuing an Executive Order shortly that will accomplish the intent of HB 707 to prevent the state from discriminating against persons or entities with deeply held religious beliefs that marriage is between one man and one woman.

“This Executive Order will prohibit the state from denying or revoking a tax exemption, tax deduction, contract, cooperative agreement, loan, professional license, certification, accreditation, or employment on the basis the person acts in accordance with a religious belief that marriage is between one man and one woman.”

As The Hill’s Ben Kamisar notes, most of the rest of the governors involved in this issue ran the other direction. In large part, that momentum resulted from media coverage such as this from WGNO:

There’s not much doubt what WGNO wanted its viewers to think, but neither the bill nor the EO sanctions bigotry. Both are meant to prevent people from using the power of the state to demand forced participation in events that violate the religious principles of business owners. Neither would prevent the state from pursuing legitimate cases of discrimination. It’s a specification for the application of the RFRA laws that states and the federal government passed to wide bipartisan consensus over the last two decades, up until it ran up against the desire of the Left to enforce participation and celebration rather than provide for tolerance.

Jindal isn’t sitting passively on the PR effort, either. The American Future Project, the PAC supporting Jindal’s presumed presidential run, launched a new 30-second spot in defense of his action. The takeaway line comes last — “The United States of America didn’t create religious liberty — religious liberty created the United States of America.”

Don’t expect to see too many other governors go this far in dealing with this issue. Most of them would rather not get involved in the fight, especially after the way Mike Pence got ripped in the national media earlier this year. Whether it’s wise or not, Jindal doesn’t seem to mind fighting for this particular political hill.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/05/20/video-jindal-issues-eo-to-defend-religious-liberty-in-louisiana/feed/383863401Jindal: We need to defend religious liberty with public policyhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/04/23/jindal-we-need-to-defend-religious-liberty-with-public-policy/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/04/23/jindal-we-need-to-defend-religious-liberty-with-public-policy/#commentsFri, 24 Apr 2015 00:41:05 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3860185Dude, he’s running. While other Republicans struggle to deal with the media’s insistence on making RSVP answers to hypothetical wedding invitations a litmus test for the presidency, Bobby Jindal has decided to double down on support for protecting religious scruples in the marketplace. In an essay for the New York Times, which put a deceptive headline on the column, Jindal explains the necessity of a new bill in Louisiana that would extend beyond RFRA to limit court infringement on religious expression through public accommodation laws:

In 2010, Louisiana adopted a Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which prohibits government from unduly burdening a person’s exercise of religion. However, given the changing positions of politicians, judges and the public in favor of same-sex marriage, along with the potential for discrimination against Christian individuals and businesses that comes with these shifts, I plan in this legislative session to fight for passage of the Marriage and Conscience Act.

The legislation would prohibit the state from denying a person, company or nonprofit group a license, accreditation, employment or contract — or taking other “adverse action” — based on the person or entity’s religious views on the institution of marriage.

Some corporations have already contacted me and asked me to oppose this law. I am certain that other companies, under pressure from radical liberals, will do the same. They are free to voice their opinions, but they will not deter me. As a nation we would not compel a priest, minister or rabbi to violate his conscience and perform a same-sex wedding ceremony. But a great many Americans who are not members of the clergy feel just as called to live their faith through their businesses. That’s why we should ensure that musicians, caterers, photographers and others should be immune from government coercion on deeply held religious convictions.

The bill does not, as opponents assert, create a right to discriminate against, or generally refuse service to, gay men or lesbians. The bill does not change anything as it relates to the law in terms of discrimination suits between private parties. It merely makes our constitutional freedom so well defined that no judge can miss it.

The New York Times headline for the essay is “Bobby Jindal: I’m Holding Firm Against Gay Marriage.” In the essay, Jindal does write that his opinion on the definition of marriage hasn’t changed, and that it remains “between one man and one woman,” as was the consensus for more than two centuries in American law. But he then goes on to argue that this isn’t the point of the law, explicitly noting that we need to protect constitutional freedoms for those who dissent:

I will not change my faith-driven view on this matter, even if it becomes a minority opinion.

A pluralistic and diverse society like ours can exist only if we all tolerate people who disagree with us. That’s why religious freedom laws matter — and why it is critical for conservatives and business leaders to unite in this debate.

In other words, the point here isn’t Jindal’s opposition to same-sex marriage, which hasn’t changed, or any attempts to block it if the Supreme Court rules that states must adopt it on equal-protection grounds under the 14th Amendment. It’s about how to deal with those who have legitimate objections to participating in same-sex weddings and restraining government from forcing them out of business for making that choice. The NYT’s headline misses the point of Jindal’s essay, and it seems like a deliberate choice.

The Daily Signal covered the emergence of the Marriage and Conscience Act last week:

H.B. 707 would prevent the government from discriminating against people because they believe marriage is the union of a man and a woman, and would prohibit the government from using its heavy hand to condition tax treatment, contracts and other benefits on a person’s acceptance of the “acceptable” view in support of same-sex marriage.

H.B. 707 would also help protect those with religious objections to being forced by the government to play a part in same-sex marriage ceremonies under threat of fines and imprisonment.

Moreover, it should serve as a danger sign to us as a country which has always prided itself on protecting the civil liberties of the minority. If we can’t even protect unpopular views in law, and instead our people are amassing in mob fashion more reminiscent of scenes in Pakistan than the United States, we all need to seriously take stock of where we are when it comes to protecting the individual civil rights of all.

H.B. 707 would protect the civil liberties of the minority when they are being marginalized simply because they believe marriage is the union of a man and a woman. This bill would simply protect people from the heavy hand of intrusive government should it attempt to coerce them to modify their beliefs regarding the institution of marriage.

We’ll see how HB707 fares in Louisiana. The experience in Indiana proved that religious expression clearly needs more protection, not less, in the US today. Jindal’s support of MCA will definitely attract the attention of social conservatives and expand his reach within the GOP base, adding to his already established pitch to reform conservatives on the basis of his success in education and his expertise on health-care reform issues. Expect to hear a lot more about this if — more like when — Jindal tosses his hat into the ring.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/04/23/jindal-we-need-to-defend-religious-liberty-with-public-policy/feed/453860185Team Hillary: It’s the media’s fault that Hillary’s position changed on same-sex marriagehttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/04/21/team-hillary-its-the-medias-fault-that-hillarys-position-changed-on-same-sex-marriage/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/04/21/team-hillary-its-the-medias-fault-that-hillarys-position-changed-on-same-sex-marriage/#commentsTue, 21 Apr 2015 22:41:25 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3859904Alternate headline: We’ve always been allies with EastGaysia. Even Chelsea Clinton has acknowledged that her parents have changed their positions on same-sex marriage over time, in part from her own lobbying on the issue. Hillary Clinton refused to back same-sex marriage when she ran for president in 2008, only switching her position on the issue two years ago last month while preparing for a run at the 2016 Democratic nomination.

CLINTON: Well, I think you’re reading it very wrong. I think that, as I said, just as the president has said, you know, just because you’re a politician, doesn’t mean you’re not a thinking human being. And you gather information. You think through positions. You’re not 100 percent set – thank goodness – you’re constantly reevaluating where you stand. That was true for me. We talked earlier about Iraq, for goodness sakes. So, for me, marriage had always been a matter left to the states. And in many of the conversations that I and my colleagues and supporters had, I fully endorse the efforts by activists who work state-by-state and in fact that is what is working. And I think that, you know, being in the position that I was in the Senate – fighting employment discrimination, which we still have some ways to go – was appropriate at that time.

As secretary of state, I was out of domestic politics and I was certainly doing all I could on the international scene to raise the importance of the human rights of the LGBT community. And then leaving that position, I was able to, you know, very quickly announce that I was fully in support of gay marriage and that it is now continuing to proceed state-by-state.

That was then, when Hillary thought she’d need to run a centrist campaign to win the nomination. (Read more of the transcript for the amusing argument made by Hillary that she couldn’t announce her change of position while serving as Secretary of State.) Last week, Hillary’s spokeswoman said that Hillary wants the Supreme Court to rule that states can’t decide the issue at all:

“Hillary Clinton supports marriage equality and hopes the Supreme Court will come down on the side of same-sex couples being guaranteed that constitutional right,” Adrienne Elrod, spokesperson, Hillary for America, told BuzzFeed News.

So what changed? Er, nothing at all, insists Team Hillary. Karen Finney told MSNBC yesterday that Hillary Clinton has been the model of consistency on same-sex marriage — and that it’s the media’s fault for asking questions:

“No change of heart,” Finney replied. “[She] was asked a different question than she was asked before, but I’ll tell you.”

Finney appeared on MSNBC again that afternoon and similarly said her team had “been asked different questions” about marriage equality. “Last week there was a question about where she was on marriage equality, which she’s had a consistent position on that — despite the way it was reported,” Finney said. “So, you know, when we’re asked the question, I think part of it, though, is as a spokesperson, we’re trying not to get ahead of her because she’s got her platform that she wants to roll out.”

In fact, the questions put to Clinton last year, last month and last week do not vary greatly enough to warrant different responses. NPR’s Terry Gross asked about Clinton’s support of marriage equality, which is when Clinton said, “For me, marriage had always been a matter left to the states.” Last month and last week, Clinton was asked about where she stands on the constitutionality of marriage equality, and that is when Clinton started referring to it as a “constitutional right” that should be guaranteed by the Supreme Court.

This prompted a riposte from Ron Fournier, who’s been singularly unimpressed with Hillary 2.0:

To his credit, Greg agreed on that point, “especially on the e-mails.”

The resort of putting up media-blaming stonewalls this early in the campaign should be a warning sign to Democrats. So far, Hillary’s not sticking around to answer questions, barely engaging with the media at all while arguing that she’s the most qualified person in the field on either side. If she can’t respond to legitimate questions about her actions or her policies and has to claim that there’s a media conspiracy in place against her at this early stage, then she’s hardly qualified at all as a candidate, let alone an actual contender for the presidency. And that should worry some Democrats, while encouraging others to provide their party with a Plan B.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/04/21/team-hillary-its-the-medias-fault-that-hillarys-position-changed-on-same-sex-marriage/feed/363859904Kasich: I’m going to a same-sex wedding soonhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/04/20/kasich-im-going-to-a-same-sex-wedding-soon/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/04/20/kasich-im-going-to-a-same-sex-wedding-soon/#commentsMon, 20 Apr 2015 16:01:55 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3859686Welcome to the latest media litmus test for Republican candidates, which like the 2012 litmus test — contraception — has absolutely nothing to do with the job for which they’re vying. Thanks to our crack legions of national reporters, we now know how Marco Rubio, Rick Santorum, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and now John Kasich will RSVP when the gilt-edged invitation shows up in the mail. Meanwhile, we still don’t know whether Hillary Clinton would sign the deal with Iran or why she refused to bolster security around the Benghazi consulate.

To borrow a phrase from, like, two years ago, dude — what difference does it make?

He’s not a flamethrower. He doesn’t criticize his fellow Republicans or even the GOP’s favorite punching bag, President Barack Obama. His positions aren’t designed to rile up the GOP base.

When asked if he would attend a same-sex wedding — Kasich is opposed to gay and lesbian nuptials — he said his friend just invited him to one and he and his wife are planning to go.

“I went home and I said to my wife, ‘my friend’s getting married. What do you think? You wanna go?’ She goes, ‘Oh, I’m absolutely going.’ I called him today and said, ‘Hey, just let me know what time it is,'” Kasich said. “My friend knows how I feel about the issue, but I’m not here to have a war with him. I care about my friend, and so it’s pretty simple for me.”

On Twitter, I noted a few reactions from fellow conservatives that declared Kasich to have disqualified himself for their vote on this basis alone. It’s not clear whether Kasich would have ever held much hope for those votes anyway, but it seems an odd basis on which to choose the next presidential nominee. How exactly does this relate to the duties of that office, not just as a significant portion but as a supreme disqualifier?

Don’t get me wrong; I am a defender of traditional marriage (which is one reason why I argued government should get out of the marriage business altogether, starting in 2008). It’s possible to be that and to attend a ceremony for a friend, as Kasich plans to do, although it’s also very understandable when people just choose to wish them the best without attending, too. What’s not understandable is how this particular question got to be a national test for Republican candidates, and why conservatives are playing along with it.

Let’s stick to the real issues that face the nation — out-of-control spending, declining defense (especially in naval power), a foreign policy that has wrecked the Middle East and amplified direct threats to our security, and an economy that’s barely limping along and that has turned millions of working-age Americans into a class of the chronically unemployed. This is just another media squirrel designed to distract from the failures of the Obama administration and the incompetence and corruption of the Clintons. It will only work as long as we allow it.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/04/20/kasich-im-going-to-a-same-sex-wedding-soon/feed/823859686Obama: What really concerns me are those “less-than-loving expressions by Christians”http://hotair.com/archives/2015/04/08/obama-what-really-concerns-me-are-those-less-than-loving-expressions-by-christians/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/04/08/obama-what-really-concerns-me-are-those-less-than-loving-expressions-by-christians/#commentsWed, 08 Apr 2015 13:21:52 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3852110The good news: After a number of atrocities that have victimized Christians from Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Kenya over the past few months, Barack Obama finally has spoken explicitly about Christians. The bad news? At the Easter prayer breakfast, Obama chose not to pray for all of those victims of genocidal Islamist terror, but to scold Christians in the US for what Obama calls “less-than-loving expressions[.]” He then reversed course, to much laughter:

“On Easter, I do reflect on the fact that, as a Christian, I am supposed to love,” the president said during the breakfast at the White House. “And I have to say that, sometimes when I listen to other less-than-loving expressions by Christians, I get concerned.”

Obama paused, then remarked “that’s a topic for another day,” sparking laughter from the audience gathered in the East Room.
“I was about to veer off; I am pulling it back,” the president said, chuckling as he gathered himself.

Ahem. In Kenya last week, almost 150 Christians got slaughtered in an al-Shabaab terrorist attack, deliberately chosen by the terrorists for murder, but nowhere in Obama’s official statement on that atrocity can one find a mention of their religion. Neither can one find in the statement any mention of the “less than loving expressions” of Islam. Two months ago, when a group linked to ISIS butchered 21 Christians from Egypt specifically for their religion, the White House statement on that mass murder not only didn’t mention either religion, it emphasized that ISIS’ attacks were “unconstrained by faith, sect, or ethnicity.” Riiiiiiight.

Furthermore, Obama seems very unconcerned when it comes to “less-than-loving expressions” from his negotiating partners. Recall this moment from his NPR interview, conducted the day after this “prayer”? Obama seems less-than-concerned about the virulent anti-Semitism of the Iranian mullahs, whom he wants to trust to adhere to a deal which would keep them from threatening millions of Jews in Israel:

So there’s still going to be a whole host of differences between us and Iran, and one of the most profound ones is the vile, anti-Semitic statements that have often come out of the highest levels of the Iranian regime. But the notion that we would condition Iran not getting nuclear weapons, in a verifiable deal, on Iran recognizing Israel is really akin to saying that we won’t sign a deal unless the nature of the Iranian regime completely transforms. And that is, I think, a fundamental misjudgment.

Finally, when it comes to “less-than-loving expressions” and Christians in this country, which was less loving? The shopkeepers who welcomed LGBT customers but decline to participate in same-sex marriage events, or the people who threatened to burn them down and run them out of town? And which should concern public officials more? Kirsten Powers wondered the same thing:

How many gay people had asked to have their wedding catered by this small-town pizza joint? None. What number of gay people had been denied a slice by O’Connor? Zero. In fact, the owners told the reporter that they would never refuse to serve a gay customer who came to the restaurant to eat. The wrath of gay rights supporters rained down on Memories Pizza because O’Connor committed a thought crime. She discriminated against nobody, but thinks the “wrong” thing about same-sex marriage and she said it out loud.

Here’s the thing: I didn’t support the original Indiana law. I am both a Christian who doesn’t believe the Bible prohibits serving a same-sex wedding and a vocal LGBT rights supporter who has blasted laws similar to Indiana’s for fear that they could provide legal protection to those who discriminate against gay people.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/04/08/obama-what-really-concerns-me-are-those-less-than-loving-expressions-by-christians/feed/2233852110Video: Protests over Indiana version of RFRA seem to miss one important pointhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/03/28/video-protests-over-indiana-version-of-rfra-seem-to-miss-one-important-point/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/03/28/video-protests-over-indiana-version-of-rfra-seem-to-miss-one-important-point/#commentsSat, 28 Mar 2015 18:31:32 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3746289The point, actually.]]>Actually, it’s more like 30 important points, but we’ll get to that in a moment. Gov. Mike Pence signed a bill into law on Thursday that offers protection for religious expression, and the entertainment world has hit the roof over it. CNN provides coverage of the protests that has been typical of that seen all week:

CNN’s announcer doesn’t get around to mentioning until almost at the end of the segment that other states have similar laws, and never mentions that the federal government does as well. Senators Orrin Hatch and Ted Kennedy sponsored the original Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) after the Supreme Court’s Smith decision that failed to protect a Native American who was denied employment benefits after having tested positive for peyote. Bill Clinton signed that RFRA into law in 1993 after it passed nearly unanimously in the Senate.

Indiana has come under fire for a bill signed Thursday by Gov. Mike Pence (R) that would allow businesses to refuse service for religious reasons. The NCAA has voiced its concern ahead of Final Four in Indianapolis next week, there are calls to boycott the state, and Miley Cyrus has even weighed in, calling Pence a name that we can’t reprint on this family Web site in an Instagram post.

Indiana might be treated as if it’s the only state with a bill like this, but it’s not.

Another 11 states have judicial precedents that constitute a RFRA policy in their courts. Over the last twenty-plus years, RFRA statutes have a clear track record of careful jurisprudence, because they don’t protect ad-hoc discrimination on any basis. That’s true on both federal and state levels, and we know this in part because the hysterics shrieking over the law in Indiana offer nothing but ignorant hypotheticals. They cannot point to a case where RFRA has been used to justify broad discrimination, because it never has.

Cases decided under RFRA get strict scrutiny on three tests. First, the religious belief has to be sincerely held, and not just a pose to make a point. Second, the state interest in overriding the religious belief has to be compelling. Last, the action taken by the state has to be the least intrusive that still satisfies the compelling state interest. Courts have been using these tests for more than two decades to separate real cases of state infringement on religious practice from simple discrimination. The Hobby Lobby decision is one such case; the Obama administration lost that case because the Supreme Court noted that even HHS had to admit it didn’t use the least intrusive method available to them, and largely punted on the issue of whether the contraception mandate intruded on sincerely-held religious belief.

RFRA covers a lot more issues than those arising from same-sex weddings, of course. This week on Relevant Radio, I interviewed a coupleof guests on cases involving the Amish and building codes, and other RFRA applications. Until the last couple of years, RFRA didn’t have much to do with the kind of public-accommodation disputes that same-sex marriage produces. It’s unclear how courts will view them until specific cases arise, but it’s almost a sure bet that it won’t allow people to discriminate against gay customers solely on the basis of their sexual orientation. The issue will rest on whether the state can force businesses to participate in events (same-sex marriages) that violate their religious beliefs, and that’s the kind of distinctions that courts have been making very successfully for over two decades under RFRA.

Except, though, that almost no one is arguing that exercise of religion excuses bigotry. Christians have not objected to providing services to LGBT customers, but to being forced to participate in same-sex weddings by the state, either by baking a cake for one or having to photograph it, and then getting forced out of business by fines when they refuse out of religious conscience. Furthermore, Christians can’t “abuse” RFRA, because it’s the courts that use it to adjudicate disputes of this kind. RFRA laws constrain the states and their actions — they don’t undo public-accommodation laws for citizens. (Merely putting a RFRA sign in the window, so to speak, doesn’t make discrimination a RFRA case.)

In my own opinion, I agree with Melinda that Christian caritas calls us to minister to all in our community — the rich, the poor, the popular, the unpopular, the prisoner, and so on. We only draw the line when we are forced to participate in activities that violate our Christian conscience — for instance, offering sacrifices to idols (as martyrs resisted in the first centuries of the church), and so on. Thanks to RFRA, we have courts that can draw pretty nuanced distinctions between the two poles using strict scrutiny on state action, but it doesn’t mean Christians will automatically win those disputes, nor should it, depending on the circumstances.

The only reason for the hyperbolic outrage coming from the entertainment and sports industries the last two days is willful ignorance. That’s their problem. It doesn’t have to be ours.

Update (3/29): The 1993 RFRA did get three dissenting votes in the Senate, so it did not pass unanimously as I had originally stated. I’ve changed it to “nearly unanimously” above. This point is also worth considering:

Folks, Indiana doesn't have public accommodation protections for gays, anyway. Some counties do, most don't. IN RFRA doesn't change that.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/03/28/video-protests-over-indiana-version-of-rfra-seem-to-miss-one-important-point/feed/2043746289Carson: Prison sex shows being gay is a choicehttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/03/04/carson-prison-sex-shows-being-gay-is-a-choice/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/03/04/carson-prison-sex-shows-being-gay-is-a-choice/#commentsWed, 04 Mar 2015 13:31:35 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3470008Does prison sex prove that sexual orientation is a choice? Given that much of what constitutes “sex” in prison occurs under some sort of duress, using it as an example of “choice” seems like … a stretch, to say the least. Dr. Ben Carson, who just announced the formation of a presidential exploration committee, defended the traditional definition of marriage in an interview this morning with CNN’s Chris Cuomo by relying on that argument to differentiate same-sex marriage advocacy from the civil rights movement (via Twitchy):

Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon and potential Republican presidential candidate, said Wednesday that “a lot of people who go into prison straight, and when they come out they’re gay.”

The remarks were made on CNN’s “New Day” in response to a question from host Chris Cuomo, who asked if Carson thought being gay was a “choice.”

“Absolutely,” Carson replied.

Asked why, he went on to explain his prison theory. “So did something happen while they were in there?” he said. “Ask yourself that question.”

Actually, please don’t. It’s entirely possible to defend the traditional definition of marriage and even the position that sexuality is a choice without citing prison sex as an indicator. Even some in the LGBT community see sexuality as a choice rather than innate, and the real answer probably lies somewhere in between — and individually, all over that range.

This is the kind of answer that makes it pretty clear that Carson’s winging it. There are plenty of ways to defend the traditional definition of marriage, perhaps especially as protection for children in procreative relationships, which is really the only real stake the state has in regulating interpersonal relationships between consenting and non-consanguinal adults anyway. Non-procreative relationships can acquire most if not all of the legal benefits of marriage through partnership contracts. The real free-market solution is to get government out of marriage altogether and let the churches define it for their congregants and have everyone rely on contracts, which government is actually suited to enforce.

This argument only serves as fodder for those who want to Akinize the whole Republican Party. If Dr. Carson wants to compete at the highest level, he’ll need to either learn the issues a lot better, or learn how to parry the obvious media attempts to make him look like a nut from the fringe. And don’t think for a moment that the media will refrain from painting all Republican presidential contenders as nuts for this, either. They will be looking for a distraction from Hillary Clinton’s meltdown, and this might do nicely for a cycle or two. Want to bet this comes up in a primary debate?